Conclusion

Abstract

AbstractThe conclusion highlights the results presented in the book by offering both additional empirical examples and new avenues for their interpretation. Rather than merely summarising the content, the conclusion discusses results and open questions along three dimensions: “metropolitan reflections,” “lines of hygiene” and “shifts of meanings.” The first point highlights how knowledge acquired in colonial encounters gave rise to a new scientific discipline—tropical medicine and hygiene—and shaped metropolitan approaches to public health. The section on “lines of hygiene” shows that purity, health and cleanliness were not clearly defined, solid concepts but explicit and implicit efforts to draw lines of difference. The last point traces the diverse meanings of hygiene from a temporal, spatial and epistemological perspective. Actors, institutions and networks from the religious, scientific and colonial spaces of knowledge interacted more or less between 1885 and 1914, and thus changed the substance of hygiene.