Bound to succeed: Science, territoriality and the emergence of disease eradication in the Panama Canal Zone

This research focuses on the relationships between disease, territoriality and the construction of scientific knowledge, identifying the ways in which the emergence of tropical medicine and disease control were shaped by, and also helped shape, colonial interpretations of territory during the construction and control of the Panama Canal. The confluence of the germ theory of disease causation and the insect-vector model of disease transmission at the end of the nineteenth century resulted in an entirely new approach to disease prevention and control---the eradication model. The construction of the Panama Canal represented the first attempt to eradicate malaria and yellow fever on a broad geographic scale, and the subsequent success of the U.S. effort was deemed as much a public health triumph as an engineering one.; Yet the successes of eradication were limited in several important ways. Steeped in territoriality, eradication succeeded only by constructing boundaries, then focusing considerable expense and effort on the territory within those boundaries while simultaneously restricting the flow of traffic across them. As such, the physical boundaries of the Canal Zone, the boundaries of social interaction and activity, and the boundaries of discourse surrounding disease and its prevention were all significantly redrawn. These territorial transformations informed disease control policy throughout the twentieth century, and continue to shape our understanding of infectious disease and its control today. Drawing from archival documents from the Panama Canal Commission and other sources, this dissertation builds upon traditional disease ecology research by incorporating theoretical perspectives from political ecology, science studies, and the colonial historiography of geography and tropical medicine.