ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Trachoma’s tropicalization: Race and epidemiology in the Chinese Labour Corps

• In Event: (Re)thinking Histories of Disease in the “Tropics” (I)

English Abstract

Trachoma, an infectious eye disease caused by the bacterium Chlamydia trachomatis, has primarily received attention from historians of science and medicine for its significance as an object of fear and intervention by American immigration authorities in the early 1900s. However, it proved a pervasive global epidemiological problem throughout the twentieth century and remains the leading infectious cause of blindness worldwide today. Although trachoma is currently recognized by the World Health Organization as a ‘neglected tropical disease,’ the illness is not necessarily endemic to tropical zones. Why did trachoma receive this designation?
Answering that question requires tracing the history of trachoma back to the early twentieth century. An outbreak among the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC), an initiative supporting British and French troops in the First World War, made the disease a major concern for the European medical establishment. This paper analyses the identification and treatment of trachoma in the CLC by military physicians, suggesting that the wartime circumstances of this work reinforced rather than clarified widespread uncertainty over the disease’s aetiology and diagnosis. Consequently, medical researchers fell back on racial stereotypes to explain the prevalence of trachoma among CLC members. These assumptions elaborated and solidified a lasting association between trachoma and Chinese peoples and environments, which laid foundations for later identifications of the disease as both neglected and ‘tropical.’

Author

• Mary Augusta Brazelton, University of Cambridge