Unsterilized Needles. Concentration Camps. And Arsenic. Put them together and what have you got? The Sleeping Sickness Experiments in Tanzania in the early 20th Century and a WHOLE BUNCH of racism.
Digressions include MK Ultra, Inflatable Tube Men, Dexter’s Lab, and PEAK coloniser energy
S/O to Cartoon Network for letting me use some Dexter Audio :) (Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42wR9udglI8)
SOURCES
- A Cameron-Smith, Chapter One: The History and Culture of Tropical Medicine (2007)
- Andrew D S Gibson, Miasma revisited: The intellectual history of tropical medicine (2009)
- Daniel R. Headrick & Philippe Büscher, Sleeping Sickness Epidemics and Colonial Responses in East and Central Africa, 1900–1940 (2014)
- Diana Duong, This Neglected Tropical Disease Can Lead Its Victims to Paranoia — And Even Death(2018)
- Edna Bonhomme, When Africa was a German laboratory, Al Jazeera (2020)
- Gregg Mitman and Paul Erickson, Latex and Blood: Science, Markets and American Empire (2010)
- Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870-1950 (2011)
- Helen Tilley, Conclusion: Experimentation in Colonial East Africa and Beyond, International Journal of African Historical Studies (2014)
- Jesse B. Bump, Ifeyinwa Aniebo, Colonialism, Malaria, and the Decolonization of Global Health (2022)
- Julia Amberger, Robert Koch and the crimes of doctors in Africa, Deutschlandfunk (2020)
- Open Yale Courses, HIST 234: Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600, Lecture 15 – Tropical Medicine as a Discipline
- Richard Strong, Strong Describes Novel Expedition, The Harvard Crimson (1926)
- Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief (2019)
- Takudzwa Hillary Chiwanza, Here is How Africa Was Used as a Laboratory for Germany During the Sleeping Sickness Epidemics, The African Exponent (2020)
- Wolfgang U. Eckart, The Colony as Laboratory: German Sleeping Sickness Campaigns in German East Africa and in Togo, 1900-1914 (2002)
- World Health Organization, Trypanosomiasis, human African (sleeping sickness) (2022)
