ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Collecting valuable data in colonies: methodological asymmetries in anti-plague vaccine evaluations between Japan’s mainland and colonies at the beginning of the 20th century

• In Event: Invisible Actors in Biomedical and Environmental Sciences (I) & (II)

English Abstract

This paper aims to analyze the ways in which colonial logic influenced methods of evaluating vaccines in the early 20th century. After the plague became a pandemic in 1894, international health authorities in Asia explored various responses. In Japan, after the refutation of director Kitasato Shibasaburō’s theory concerning the microbial etiology of plague, bacteriologists at the Tokyo Institute of Infectious Diseases sought to reorient their research. In this context, Taiwan, annexed to Japan following the first Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), was seen as a testing ground for innovative anti-plague products, alongside some major cities in mainland Japan. Unlike the data collected in Japan’s cities, however, the data collected in Taiwan was considered a highly valuable means of allowing bacteriologists to observe the effectiveness of these products. However, a comparison between the work in Taiwan and mainland Japan reveals that the Taiwanese data was less robust than Japanese bacteriologists had initially claimed.
Based on this case study, I highlight how knowledge obtained in a colonial situation was appropriated and transformed into Japanese scientific knowledge, erasing the local context of its original production. How and why did Japanese bacteriologists overlook the material difficulties encountered in Taiwan? Drawing on secondary literature that shows how therapeutic inventions led to scandalous practices in colonial situations, this paper examines the less scandalous, yet still deeply problematic impact of Japan’s colonial logic on its biomedical methodologies and public health actions.

Author

• Shiori Nosaka, University of Strasbourg