Abstract
This thesis examines how twentieth-century anaemia research and its evolution in the Afro-Indian Ocean laboratory became a pivotal intersection of science, race ideology and empire. It does this by tracing the trans-imperial research careers of British-born Henry Foy, the first scientific employee of the Wellcome Trust, and a Greek physician, Dr Athena Kondi. The thesis follows Foy and Kondi across almost three politically volatile decades of the twentieth century, specifically the late 1930s to 1960, on three continents. Their work in the ‘living laboratories’ of Greece/Macedonia and the 'Afro-Indian' South – in southern and east coast Africa (including the Sudan, Mozambique, Kenya, and South Africa; the Seychelle Islands, and different regions of the South Asian subcontinent – were facilitated by the administrative apparatuses of late British imperial rule and its expatriate enterprises. That research can be understood as part of a political strategy to cultivate loyalty and extended political influence through medical interventions, even if treatments were subsidiary to the drive for knowledge production. Their haematological laboratory work, publications and geographical path were part of an African 'scramble for medical knowledge,' unfolding within an increasingly competitive world of emerging global public health. In this story, too, we can see how Foy and Kondi, as ambitious professionals, worked to develop personal recognition for their craft. They used invitations by agro-capitalists and colonial state administrators to assess the fitness of workers and subjects. With political change and in an emerging era of ‘third world development’, they integrated their efforts into the drives of health surveillance by organizations such as the World Health Organization in the new Cold War. One key theme that runs through this thesis is Foy and Kondi’s intermittent ability to challenge the field by asserting the spuriousness of ‘race’ as a medically useful category, through a focus on cultural variables, such as diet, as well as specific socio-economic and environmental conditions. Yet their notions of culture remained steeped in racist ideas of the exotic, colonial ‘other’ and of the spurious ‘racial science’ circulating across the Atlantic. Their blood sampling and frameworks contributed to colonial ethnographic mapping, and the medical value of their spatial representations of disease prevalence remained questionable.