New Concepts of Life: Making Citizens and Heroes in the Caribbean

• In Event: Biopolitics: The Body as Property

Abstract

This paper examines relations between U.S. empire and medicine in the wake of the Spanish-American War (1898) in order to better understand how an emergent discourse of contagion at the turn of the twentieth century legitimized American colonial projects across the Caribbean. Paying particular attention to Cuba and the pioneering research efforts of Walter Reed and William Gorgas, I re-contextualize this “age of heroic medicine” through diverse and at times competing representations of medico-military intervention found in fiction, patient archives, and doctor journals. Drawing on this poetics of health intervention, I reconstruct the uneven distributions of political agency and narrative authority governing dominant histories of U.S. medical intervention. My paper incorporates imaginative literature – namely, Sinclair Lewis’ novel, Arrowsmith (1925) – as a counterpoint to the hagiographic cultural narratives that manufacture doctor-heroes like Reed, Gorgas, and others. I argue that, by recuperating disavowed contexts of medical experimentation in the Caribbean, Lewis’ novel at once traffics in and destabilizes American medicine’s intensely racialized language of disease transmission. By analyzing these overlaps and tensions in accounts of U.S. medical power, this paper aims to paint a more complete picture of how military medicine in early twentieth-century Cuba channeled research in bacteriology through the colonial hierarchies of race to justify far-reaching policies of biopolitical intervention.

Author

• James Fitz Gerald, SUNY at Binghamton