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Confronting Rabies and Its Treatments in Colonial Madagascar, 1899-1910
Abstract
Rabies constituted a point of cultural tension and divergence over disease in late nineteenth-century, post-conquest Madagascar. The Pasteur Institute and colonial authorities ascribed an extraordinary importance to rabies, given the means at their disposal, and given the other epidemiological challenges facing them. Local peoples, in turn, met this expertise with some trepidation, and in some cases, outright defiance. This article considers, in turn, colonial health priorities, connections between Malagasy cures and Pasteurian remedies, as well as issues of accommodation, resistance and rumour in a colonial context.
... As such, French Pasteurian scientists prescribed much heavier doses of vaccine in Madagascar than was normally the case elsewhere. Finally, and more importantly, the Malagasy people reacted to Pasteurian science using indigenous beliefs, local taboos about dogs and rabies, and at times resorting to local cures (Jennings 2009). ...
This paper examines histories of postvaccinal breaks in immunity to rabies in domestic dogs between 1950 and the 1960s. It utilizes Veterinary and Native Commissioner's reports and newspapers in arguing that there is a gap in current southern African rabies historiography as it is yet to grapple with narratives about vaccine technologies. Current southern African rabies histories overly focus on white South African urban case studies. Focusing on the histories of postvaccinal breaks in immunity to rabies in Southern Rhodesia helps to explain why rabies became an ineradicable canine disease in southern Africa during this period. The paper focuses on the political economy of the mass vaccination of dogs, the costs attached to the Veterinary Department's decision to ignore other canine diseases in African areas, and how this, combined with other policy measures such as dog taxation, in undermining rabies vaccination campaigns. Overall, it shows that African dog-owners resorted to a myriad of responses to coercive rabies regulations. This complexity ultimately resulted in canine rabies becoming a difficult disease to eradicate.
Rabies prevention has become a vital part of public health administration owing to the high incidence of rabies in Japan in modern times. The rabies prevention system in Japan, which was gradually established based on the rabies knowledge and prevention policies from Europe and the United States, was centered on livestock dog control, wild dog culling, and vaccination. This epidemic prevention system was based on two premises. First, though rabies is a zoonotic infectious disease, the focus of epidemic prevention administration was to protect humans, not dogs. Second, this system attempted to eliminate the rabies hazard at its source by reducing the number of all dogs—livestock dogs included. Under this epidemic prevention mechanism, the survival space of dogs as an object of public health administration was significantly eroded. In contrast, during wartime, the Japanese Empire encouraged people to donate their dogs to the military so their fur could be used to make military coats, and in the name of existing rabies prevention programs, extended the target of culling from wild dogs only to all non-military dogs. This administrative model of epidemic prevention, which attempted to hide the violence and arbitrariness of dog killing by creating artificial distinctions among dogs, is a metaphor for the power training mechanism in modern society.
Rabies became one of the critical zoonoses in the modern urban environment since pet keeping culture became widespread in the Western countries in the 18th century. The sanitary policy against rabies was a forceful tool for the colonial rulers in the 19th century. This study describes the rabies outbreaks in the context of prevention methods, experts' engagement and the public response to the policies based on the statistics, regulations and newspaper articles on rabies in Korea during the Japanese colonial period. Based on the changes in the rabies policies, this study divides the time period into three phases. First phase (1905- 1914) was characterized with the first epizootics investigation in Korea in 1905 and the "Domestic dog control regulation" in 1909, which legitimated elimination of dogs without owners' name tags. In the second phase (1915-1926), rabies was designated as a reportable disease by the "Act on Prevention of Domestic Animal Infectious Diseases (1915)" and thousands of dogs were slaughtered every year for rabies prevention. In the third phase (1927-1945), vaccination for dogs became a main intervention. From 1927 to 1942, 760,515 dogs were vaccinated. However, the broad scale rabies control projects over these decades did not seem to decrease the outbreaks of rabies because they did not reflect the rabies situation in Korea. Furthermore, the rabies control policy of the Japanese colonial government was criticized by the public for its violence against dogs and humans, for causing conflicts between social classes, and for lack of understanding of traditional human-dog relationship.
Non-human primates harbor zoonotic pathogens including the ra- bies virus (Rabies lyssavirus). Though the chances of rabies trans- mission from primates is low, guidelines currently recommend a post-exposure prophylaxis for unvaccinated persons. In Madagas- car, lemurs have been described as carriers of the rabies virus, but a discussion about the risk of rabies transmission to humans from lemurs, particularly in the context of in-country ownership of lemurs, has not been studied. We use qualitative and quantitative data collected from household surveys (n = 271 interviewees who had seen a pet lemur across 12 urban towns), web-based surveys (n = 229), and the literature (publications using data collected by the Institute Pasteur of Madagascar over the last century) to ex- amine the context in which the rabies virus could be transmitted from lemurs to humans. Though only a few wild and pet lemurs in Madagascar have tested positive for rabies, post-exposure treat- ment is sometimes also sought out following aggressive incidents with lemurs. Many interviewees (22 ± 6%, mean ± 95% confidence interval CI) across 12 towns indicated that pet lemurs they had seen, had a history of aggression. Some lemur owners appear to be aware that their pets could transmit the rabies virus and seek veterinary care to prevent this. The public health burden of rabies is relatively low in Madagascar and despite some anecdotes in the literature, it appears that lemurs are rarely the source of rabies when humans become infected. However, this case study high- lights the lack of data and publications regarding the public health implications of human-lemur contact in Madagascar.
This paper examines the attempt of British missionaries on Madagascar to use medicine and the mission hospital as a way to convert the Malagasy people during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In their attempt to educate the Malagasy about the benefits of Western civilization, which was often defined through science as well as Christianity, missionaries were challenged by Malagasy culture and the local environment. To counter the ability of the Malagasy to challenge Western methods through their cultural beliefs and healing practices and so convert the Malagasy to Western ways, British missionaries had to carve out a space isolated from the Malagasy environment. Medicine, particularly the mission hospital, offered a space to champion Western science and Christianity. In their attempt to bring civilization to Madagascar, missionaries directly tied together science and Christianity while domesticating the space of the hospital.
Seuchenzüge treten definitionsgemäß in Intervallen auf. Da ihre Ätiologie und Epidemiologie im Vorfeld zunächst meist mit erheblichen Unsicherheiten behaftet sind, werden historische Denkweisen und Analogien herangezogen, um Seuchengefahren zu erkennen und Gegenmaßnahmen zu treffen. Die zugrunde liegenden Traditionen lassen sich teilweise über Jahrzehnte oder gar Jahrhunderte zurück verfolgen.
At the turn of the twentieth century, a series of troublesome encounters unfolded between several French colonial medical doctors and gender-variant, male-bodied persons (sarimbavy in Malagasy). Medico-ethnographic texts were published in academic journals in the French metropole based upon these doctor-sarimbavy interactions. This article reveals how sarimbavy were situated within the biopolitics of colonial penal, labor, and medical infrastructures in Madagascar. Additionally, by following the bibliographic trail of the sarimbavy figure in documents published in England and the United States, this article exposes how initial encounters in the colony were entextualized and deployed as evidence for sexological arguments in Europe and North America. Throughout, sarimbavy were read variously as asexual and sexual, as externally perverted and internally inverted, as artistic, degenerate, and ill. The ways in which the spectral figure of the sarimbavy moved across multiple empires highlights the colonial impulse at the heart of the Euro-American endeavor to further sexological theory.
This paper analyses the demography of nineteenth-century Madagascar in the light of the debate generated by the demographic transition theory. Both supporters and critics of the theory hold to an intrinsic opposition between human and ‘natural’ factors, such as climate, famine and disease, influencing demography. They also suppose a sharp chronological divide between the pre-colonial and colonial eras, arguing that whereas ‘natural’ demographic influences were of greater importance in the former period, human factors predominated thereafter. This paper argues that in the case of nineteenth-century Madagascar the human factor, in the form of the Merina state, was the predominant demographic influence. However, the impact of the state was felt through natural forces, and it varied over time. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Merina state policies stimulated agricultural production, which helped to create a larger and healthier population and laid the foundation for Merina military and economic expansion within Madagascar. From the 1820, the cost of such expansionism led the state to increase its exploitation of forced labour at the expense of agricultural production and thus transformed it into a negative demographic force. Infertility and infant mortality, which were probably more significant influences on overall population levels than the adult mortality rate, increased from 1820 due to disease, malnutrition and stress, all of which stemmed from state forced labour policies. Available estimates indicate little if any population growth for Madagascar between 1820 and 1895. The demographic ‘crisis’ in Africa, ascribed by critics of the demographic transition theory to the colonial era, stemmed in Madagascar from the policies of the imperial Merina regime which in this sense formed a link to the French regime of the colonial era. In sum, this paper questions the underlying assumptions governing the debate about historical demography in Africa and suggests that the demographic impact of political forces be re-evaluated in terms of their changing interaction with ‘natural’ demographic influences.
Y.-G. Paillard — Demographie Research on Madagascar at the Beginning of the Colonial Period and AMI Documents.
According to the estimates made at the end of the igth century, the population of Madagascar was then varying between two and eight million. When the island became part of the French territory in 1896, the colonial authorities proved most anxious to know the number of native taxpayers and the supply of labour force they could reasonably reckon on. Difficulties of ail kind, however, did not permit for a long time to collect reliable statistical data, and only that questionable information is available to historians. It is yet certain that the island was really sparsely populated, which considerably hampered its 'exploitation'. Hence a series of steps with a view to increasing the population as soon as Gallieni (1896-1905) came into power; the main initiative was the creation in 1899 of the AMI (Native Medical Assistance), a pioneering undertaking which was then repeated in other places, and the results of which proved quite significant. Thanks to these efforts, a large quantity of reports and publications is now available, the systematic exploitation of which, together with that of other sources of various kinds, should permit to have a better idea of the actual population of the island at the beginning of the 2oth century (between two and a half and three million?), to study its distribution, the changes in birth and death rates, the effects of epidemie diseases such as malaria, etc. The particularly large amount of documents on the capital, Tananarive, permits an in-depth analysis.
Importée de Maurice, où elle sévit à l'état endémique, la peste frappe Tamatave en février 1921, mais n'y reste pas circonscrite. Pour la première fois, ce fléau considéré jusque-là comme « maladie des ports » pénètre à l'intérieur de l'île et atteint la capitale, véhiculé directement peut-être à partir de Tamatave par un pesteux bubonique ou tout simplement par des rats. On pense aussi à une lente propagation de la maladie le long de la voie ferrée Tananarive-Côte Est, comme en témoignent l'épisode d'infection murine à Périnet en 1921 et l'existence sur ce même axe de localités qui vont se révéler dans les années ultérieures comme des foyers importants d'endémie pesteuse (Moramanga, Manjakandriana). Le froid qui règne sur les Hautes Terres centrales en saison sèche (avec des températures descendant facilement au-dessous de + 15 °C), la gravité des affections respiratoires, risquent de provoquer une complication pulmonaire chez les pestiférés buboniques. C'est ainsi que la peste, « maladie nouvelle » pour les Merina, se déclenche dans la capitale, au coeur même de leur pays, sous sa forme la plus contagieuse et presque toujours mortelle.
Vampires and heart thieves have, it is said, inhabited the island of Madagascar for the last century. These mythic figures signify relations of identity tied to the global processes of colonial capitalism, modernism, and imperialism as they relate to a colonized Africa, and more specifically to the island of Madagascar. The vampire and heart thief express the array of extractive processes rooted in the social relations between colonizer and colonized, political subjects, empire, church, and state. These mythic figures we manipulated by various groups to fulfil specific local political agendas and invoke difference based upon race and class. Rumors and sightings of vampires and heart thieves create a landscape of fear which enables or constrains complicity with, or rebellion against, agents of the state and the church.
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Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez (1985) creates a powerful image of Latin American modernity in the character of Dr. Juvenal Urbino. Urbino is called back from France, where he has studied medicine and embraced European modernity, in order to save the coastal Colombian city in which he was born from that quintessence of the premodern world of ignorance, filth, and backwardness—cholera. García Márquez captures exquisitely the terror that is conjured up by the disease—thousands of bodies wracked by rivers of diarrhea and vomit, cramps, sunken eyes, blue lips, and twisted limbs, many of them dying rapidly. But Urbino is armed with that quintessence of modernity—hygiene. The terror inspired by the epidemic enables Urbino to transform both the urban landscape and bodily practices in keeping with the dictates of Continental biopower, neatly mediated by his own patrician class standing.
Demographic research on Madagascar at the beginning of the Colonial period and AMI documents
- Paillard Y.-G