You have full access to this open access chapter. The personal regimen recommended in the medical literature on tropical hygiene around focussed on asceticism, self-discipline and temperance. These measures were congruent with the proscriptions of Pietist purity, underlining the continued belief in a connection between morality and disease.
This puritan dimension of tropical hygiene allowed the Basel medical missionaries to position themselves as experts on the matter and mould scientific and colonial debates with their religious logic. They enjoyed extensive moral authority among the colonial public, not only advising how the sick should be treated but also prescribing healthy diets, behaviours and lifestyles.
Although many of the debates surrounding tropical hygiene were carried out in medical journals and other specialised publications, their influence ranged far beyond the disciplinary boundaries of tropical medicine, gaining currency in wider social and political contexts.
You have full access to this open access chapter, Download chapter PDF. It evoked a spiritual, ascetic ideal of purity and self-control, a quality that conquered the dangers of a hostile physical and social environment through the mastery of mind over body. Advice on tropical hygiene and the treatment of tropical diseases had only played a minor role in travel guidebooks in the first half of the nineteenth century. Footnote 1 One of the first handbooks dealing with such questions explicitly with regard to Africa was authored by James Africanus Beale Horton.
Footnote 2 Born as a son of a former slave in Sierra Leone in , he was one of the first Africans to train as a physician at a British university in the nineteenth century. He served as a doctor in the West India Regiment on the Gold Coast in and published his medical compendium advising Europeans on how to stay in good health in the tropics in Footnote 3 Horton asserted that the tropical climate and the unfamiliar environment posed a great threat to the physical and mental health of Europeans.
