ABSTRACT
‘Gentlemen, I forget that I am in Europe’ was Robert Koch’s comment on the conditions in Hamburg during the cholera epidemic of 1892. 1 The new science of bacteriology offered powers of intervention into the darkest recesses of foul living-conditions, as well as into the fluids and fibres of the human constitution. The stigma of the sick person was compounded by the sense that disease was implanted by alien species of bacteria. Epidemics were deemed to be a throwback to a more primitive era when Europeans stood at a cultural level similar to the ‘ lower’ colonial races. Bacteriology as advanced by Koch was imbued with the sense of a civilising mission. It offered a comprehensive causal explanation for the occurrence of disease: Koch and his disciples were scientific empire-builders, as they demanded hygiene institutes and facilities for surveillance of micro-organisms harboured by people, animals and the natural environment.
