Expeditions into ‘Central Man’: Imperial Romance, Tropical Medicine, and Heroic Masculinity

In this chapter, Taylor-Pirie considers how parasitology became rhetorically and materially entangled in the imperial imagination with travelogues, anthropological treatise, imperial romance fiction, and missionary biography. These modes jointly constructed the colonial encounter as a feat of manly endurance, using the linguistic enjoinment of medicine and exploration to frame parasitologists as modern heroes. Examining the influence of Thomas Carlyle’s conceptualisation of the heroic in history and imperial cartography as a strategy of representation, she demonstrates how tropical illness became a subject associated with pioneers, poets, and prophets, mapped onto the larger field of empire by the adventure mode. Through close readings of Henry Seton Merriman’s With Edged Tools (1894), John Masefield’s Multitude and Solitude (1909), and Joseph Hocking’s The Dust of Life (1915), she demonstrates the utility of forms like the ‘soldier hero’ and ‘imperial hunter’ in elaborating masculine citizenship in the context of tropical illness and ‘muscular Christianity’.