The Business of Tropical Medicine: Connections Between Anti-malarial Campaigns in Sierra Leone, 1899–1901, and Jamaica, 1908

This essay explores the circulation of medical knowledge and practice across colonies and tropical dependencies through the work of researchers at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. Specifically, our goal is to show how and why malaria research was carried out at two specific sites, Freetown, Sierra Leone, and Jamaica, in order to explore the connections and wide-ranging interests that link these two places as they relate to corporate interests and medical priorities. We first explore the role of corporate donors in the 1899 founding of the Liverpool School (LSTM), particularly the role played by the head of the Elder Dempster shipping house, Alfred Jones, whose influence as chairman led to the hiring of Ronald Ross, one of the world’s foremost malaria researchers. This hire signalled that the school’s top priority would be in curing this disease which, more than any other, was responsible for illness on European-owned ships, on plantations, and in European trading factories. The first major expedition of the school, led by Ross, was to Freetown, where Jones and other major donors of the Liverpool School had significant financial interests. After analysing the strategies and recommendations of the Liverpool Team in Freetown, we then turn to the ‘campaign’ against malaria in Jamaica, another place where Jones had economic interests. We explore the impact of Jones’ financial concerns on the Jamaican venture, but we also consider the influence of the medical researcher who led the expedition, William Prout, an LSTM researcher and former medical officer of health in Sierra Leone. We examine how knowledge garnered in one tropical centre was applied (and misapplied) in a colony with quite different conditions on the other side of the Atlantic. We argue that diverse corporate interests were influential in shaping an agenda that prioritized targeted medical ‘campaigns,’ designed to protect European employees and indigenous and immigrant wage labourers in their own organizations. In doing so, research funds were swung away from other initiatives in public health and basic maternal care, among other things. We also demonstrate the crucial importance of local exigencies in influencing scientific views. The men involved in these intertwined business and medical initiatives hailed from diverse ethnic and national backgrounds which indicates the wide-ranging nature of the influences at work.