Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics: Science, Medicine, the Environment, and the Construction of the Panama Canal

Between 1904 and 1914, the United States built the Panama Canal, an ambitious engineering project undertaken in the shadow of the French failure two decades earlier. The French experience taught American administrators several lessons, none more potent than the need to mitigate the destructiveness of so-called “tropical” diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. The U.S. responded with a sanitary program, informed by several critical mosquito vector discoveries at the end of the 19th century, that seemed to successfully meet that threat; indeed, many Americans claimed to have solved one of the vexing medical and imperial problems of the era: the settling of temperate peoples in tropical environments. The Americans had, to use the words of a contemporary commentator, pulled the teeth of the tropics. This talk will examine American perceptions of the tropics at the turn of the last century, how those perceptions informed U.S. sanitary and other administrative practices in Panama, and how those practices in turn resulted in the creation of a Canal Zone landscape that mixed marked public health improvements with racial and medical inequalities. It will also examine how the environmental changes wrought by canal construction actually created many of the conditions conducive to malaria and yellow fever transmission, and how it was scientists working in Panama who came to notice the disconnect between an environmental ideology that naturalized tropical disease and a material reality that implicated environmental changes as critical to the Isthmus’ public health challenges.
hm 5/6/11