Networks in Tropical Medicine: Internationalism, Colonialism, and the Rise of a Medical Specialty, 1890–1930 Deborah Joy, Neill. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.

Networks in Tropical Medicine: Internationalism, Colonialism, and the Rise of a Medical Specialty, 1890-1930 Deborah Joy, Neill. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012.Science has power, and empire does violence to people. These realizations have been at the heart of the now well-established fields of History of Science and of colonial and postcolonial studies since their inception. Yet examining the power relations embedded in the realm of science and the ways in which violence occurs in colonial and postcolonial situations reveal deep complications behind these simple assertions. Deborah Neill's examination of networks in tropical medicine engages those complexities. She argues "that European tropical medicine experts successfully built a network of professional researchers and clinicians that helped them establish their collective authority as experts in a new field of scientific inquiry" (3). She shows how in the process they "both facilitated certain kinds of medical advances and contributed to oppressive colonial practices in Europe's African colonies" -(3). Her book is more wide-ranging than this summary of her argument suggests, and Neill deftly weaves her different themes together in an admirably clear analysis. Moreover, her book offers a genuinely transnational treatment of her topic. Neill shows how colonizing powers influenced each other and were influenced by the spirit of scientific competition and the quest for national honor. Colonialism became part of the process through which European nations responded to each other and articulated ideas about their own national identities. Although she doesn't use an American case study, scholars of American culture can learn from Neill's transnational methodology, along with her insights into the ideological shaping of scientific research and her investigation of historical situations in which researchers, scientists, and policymakers from a Western scientific background assumed superiority over indigenous communities. Her work would complement John Farley's examination of American and European imperial medicine in Bilharzia: A history of Imperial Tropical Medicine (1991).Networks in Tropical Medicine is a very good example of how a central object of study, in this case tropical medicine, can demonstrate a number of different historical developments and processes. Neill first examines the rise of metropolitan scientific institutions for the study of tropical medicine then describes the formation of a "cadre" of (mostly white, mostly male) medical researchers and their networks, before turning to her central case study: sleeping sickness. In a comparative analysis of East and West Africa, she offers concrete examples of the interplay of global and local in the rise of supposedly objective scientific practices. She argues these regions approached the treatment of sleeping sickness differently due to different conditions on the ground, the types of resistance or co-operation offered by African communities, and the different time periods at which treatments were introduced. She then turns to the story of drug researcher Paul Ehrlich to illustrate broader processes of colonial exploitation, scientific exploration, and ethical debates around drug testing. …