The Scientific Space of Knowledge: Medical Missionaries, Tropical Medicine and the Age of Hygiene

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter shows that the Basel Mission doctors participated in a scientific space of knowledge, in which hygiene came to dominate a wide range of research areas and radically transformed people’s lives across all levels of European societies. It starts by asking how and why the Basel Mission embraced mission medicine based on scientific methods, making it the first Germanophone evangelical mission society to deploy academically trained medical missionaries from the 1880s. These medical missionaries moved in international academic circles, published in medical journals and contributed to the scientific debates of the time. Hygiene broadened the interests of the Basel Mission doctors, allowing them to link themselves with the contemporary zeitgeist and to free themselves from accusations of puritan narrowness. The fact that they succeeded in positioning themselves as important protagonists in the nineteenth-century hygiene movement reveals that the seemingly scientific arguments presented by medical experts, social reformers and political authorities worked in much the same way as older religious purity regulations.