Haynes D M
Department of History, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
Soc Hist Med. 2000 Dec;13(3):467-93. doi: 10.1093/shm/13.3.467.
Much of the historical literature on tropical medicine represents the periphery as the chief site for the production of western knowledge about disease in the British empire. This study on the Filaria perstans-sleeping sickness hypothesis revises this perspective by showing how the imperial metropole functioned as a culture space for the construction of knowledge about the empire. Beginning in 1891, Patrick Manson used the publicity resources of London to generate a rhetorical imperative for the confirmation of his hypothesis without ever leaving Britain. Later, while he was medical adviser to the imperial state, the 1900 sleeping sickness epidemic in Uganda presented Manson with a unique opportunity to determine the validity of his hypothesis. By exaggerating the possible spread of the epidemic privately among Foreign Office personnel and publicly in the medical press, he succeeded in mobilizing the first Royal Society sleeping sickness research expedition to Africa in 1902. While this expedition ultimately disproved Manson's hypothesis, this outcome ironically created the very conditions for the identification of the actual causal agent (Trypanosoma gambiense) and its vector (tsetse fly) by Aldo Castellani and David Bruce respectively.
许多关于热带医学的历史文献都将边缘地区视为大英帝国西方疾病知识产生的主要场所。这项关于常现丝虫病—昏睡病假说的研究修正了这一观点，它展示了帝国中心如何作为一个文化空间，用于构建有关帝国的知识。从1891年开始，帕特里克·曼森利用伦敦的宣传资源，在从未离开英国的情况下，为证实他的假说营造了一种修辞上的迫切需求。后来，当他担任帝国政府的医学顾问时，1900年乌干达的昏睡病疫情为曼森提供了一个独特的机会来验证他的假说。通过私下向外交部人员夸大疫情可能的传播范围，并在医学报刊上公开宣传，他成功地促成了1902年皇家学会首次派往非洲的昏睡病研究考察队。虽然这次考察最终推翻了曼森的假说，但具有讽刺意味的是，这一结果恰恰为阿尔多·卡斯特拉尼和大卫·布鲁斯分别鉴定出实际病原体（冈比亚锥虫）及其传播媒介（采采蝇）创造了条件。
