5 - Typhoid in the Tropics: Imperial Bodies, Warfare, and the Reframing of Typhoid as a Global Disease

Summary

In the thick of the most expensive war during Queen Victoria’s reign, on June 29, 1900, the American-born Conservative MP for Westminster, William Burdett-Coutts, stood before the House of Commons and retold a shockingly solemn scene from his recent wartime travel to Bloemfontein, South Africa:

After the railway was opened, there was one of the hospitals containing typhoid patients which had no disinfectants of any kind, and another in which the corpse of one of the patients who had died during the night had been stuffed into the only lavatory there was in the hospital. It was found by the patients who went to use the lavatory in the morning.

Klein’s research less than a year prior, on the infectivity of the animal typhoid corpse, had a corporeal corollary of striking proportions on the South African veldt. In January of 1900 Burdett-Coutts sailed for South Africa as a special war correspondent for the Times, writing to his Westminster constituents days before departing that “too much information cannot be given to the public” about the condition of sick and wounded British troops. In February he arrived in Cape Town, from there moving inland to join the combined British forces in Bloemfontein, the center of the most heated battle with the Afrikaner Boers and with the typhoid bacillus. In March he published the first in a series of seven sensational articles in the Times entitled “Our Wars and Our Wounded.” His story of a typhoid corpse stuffed into a lavatory highlights the emergence of yet another intense moment in the Victorian history of the filth disease. So concerned were members of Parliament that on July 19, 1900, in response to Burdett-Coutts’s typhoid claims, they established a royal commission—that preeminently Victorian response to real or imagined crisis—to investigate the care and treatment of the sick and wounded in South Africa.

Although Burdett-Coutts’s story of typhoid corpses was sensational, by mid-1900 stories like his were not uncommon. It was clear to anyone reading the press in Britain that far more British soldiers, officers, and medics were dead or dying from typhoid than from battle.