|
Books > Humanities > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > General
In October 1946, Colonel Presley Rixey arrived by destroyer at
Chichi Jima to repatriate 22,000 Japanese who had been bypassed
during the war in the Pacific. While waiting for a Marine battalion
to arrive, the colonel met daily with a Japanese commission
assigned to assist him. When asked what had happened to American
prisoners on the island, the Japanese hatched a story to hide the
atrocities that they had committed. In truth, the downed flyers had
been captured, executed, and eaten by certain senior Japanese
officers. This is the story of the investigation, the cover-up, and
the last hours of those Americans who disappeared into war's
wilderness and whose remains were distributed to the cooking
galleys of Chichi Jima. Rixey's suspicion of a cover-up was later
substantiated by a group of Americans returning from Japan who had
lived on Chichi Jima for generations. It would take five months of
gathering testimony to uncover all the details. Thirty war
criminals were eventually tried at Guam in 1947, five of whom met
their fate on the gallows.
During the nineteenth century, European scientists and physicians
considered the tropics the natural home of pathogens. Hot and
miasmic, the tropical world was the locus of disease, for Euopeans
the great enemy of civilization. In the late nineteenth century
when bacteriological laboratories and institutions were introduced
to British India, they were therefore as much an imperial mission
to cleanse and civilize a tropical colony as a medical one to
eradicate disease. Bacteriology offered a panacea in colonial
India, a way by which the multifarious political, social,
environmental, and medical problems and anxieties, intrinsically
linked to its diseases, could have a single resolution.
Bacteriology in British India is the first book to provide a social
and cultural history of bacteriology in colonial India, situating
it within the confluence of advances in germ theory, Pastuerian
vaccines, colonial medicine, laboratory science, and British
imperialism. It recounts the genesis of bacteriology and laboratory
medicine in India through a complex history of conflict and
alignment between Pasteurism and British imperial medicine. By
investigating an array of laboratory notes, medical literature, and
literary sources, the volume links colonial medical research with
issues of poverty, race, nationalism, and imperial attitudes toward
tropical climate and wildlife, contributing to a wide field of
scholarship like the history of science and medicine, sociology of
science, and cultural history. Pratik Chakrabarti is Chair in
History of Science and Medicine, University of Manchester.
|
|