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Article ID: CBB000830020

Nature's Agents or Agents of Empire? Entomological Workers and Environmental Change during the Construction of the Panama Canal (2007)

Sutter, Paul S. (Author)

Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 98
Pages: 724--754

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Public health Panama Canal Malaria Insect control Environmental health; environmental medicine Ecology 20th century, early

This essay examines the role that entomological workers played in U.S. public health efforts during the construction of the Panama Canal (1904--1914). Entomological workers were critical to mosquito control efforts aimed at the reduction of tropical fevers such as malaria. But in the process of studying vector mosquitoes, they discovered that many of the conditions that produced mosquitoes were not intrinsic to tropical nature per se but resulted from the human-caused environmental disturbances that accompanied canal building. This realization did not mesh well with an American ideology of tropical triumphalism premised on the notion that the Americans had conquered unalloyed tropical nature in Panama. The result, however, was not a coherent counternarrative but a set of intraadministrative tensions over what controlling nature meant in Panama. Ultimately, entomological workers were loyal not just to the U.S. imperial mission in Panama but also to a modernist culture of science and to the workings of mosquito ecology as they understood them.

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Description On “the role that entomological workers played in U.S. public health efforts during the construction of the Panama Canal.” (from the abstract)

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