Chapter 4 - The Boy Doctor of Empire

Summary

In his early writings, Rudyard Kipling employs the medical discourse of sanitation as a method to manage the 'natives'. Therefore, after the discovery of malaria’s transmission in 1897, Kipling could have created fictions of disease containment and mastery by depicting the mosquito as a definitive foe, as did the authorities of tropical medicine such as Ronald Ross and Patrick Manson. Instead, Kipling uses the transformative potential of the novel to emphasize the cyclical changes wrought on bodies by malaria over time. Kipling uses certain markers of malaria illness narrative—cyclical temporal and spatial imagery, repeated feverish states, and bodily change—to create a fantasy community of 'seasoned' Anglo-Indian expats, at home in, but also ruling over, colonial India. In Kim, the fact that the Anglo-Indian boy has survived malaria makes him the prototype of a seasoned colonist, whose physical adaptability may enable ongoing British political dominance. This chapter analyzes the impact of episodes of fever in Kipling’s autobiographical writing on his fiction. It concludes by placing Kipling’s work in dialog with analysis of contemporary illness narrative, arguing that we must keep in mind the ties between narratives of disease ‘remission’ and the history of colonial medicine.