Contagion and Enclaves, as the title suggests, juxtaposes the terror that contagion posed to white confidence in the tropical colonies with the solace offered by enclaves—spaces of health, order, and colonial control. The title promises a widely cast history of medicine that might illuminate the ambivalence at the heart of empire and illustrate the dual face of colonialism—an exploitative economic and cultural enterprise cast as a mission to civilize subjects and to cure ills, predestined to fall short of its mission. This is a book, then, that seems eminently suited for the series “Postcolonialism across the Disciplines,” in which it is published. But while the title tantalizes with the promise of interdisciplinary contagion, the monograph remains entrenched within the boundaries of its subdisciplinary enclave.
The subdisciplinary concerns that circumscribe the book are spelled out in the introductory chapter that references a well-established “canon” of colonial medicine to discuss the...
