| Charles Nicolle (1866-1936) was a pastorian, a Nobel Prize-winning bacteriologist, director of the Pasteur Institute of Tunis, philosopher of biology, and novelist. This dissertation explores the relations between these activities and the context of Third Republic France and its imperial mission.;Nicolle's experience in Tunis also changed his attitude toward the orthodox pastorian doctrine, as preached and practiced by the director of the Pasteur Institute of Paris, Emile Roux. In particular, he came to doubt the pastorians' "one bacteria creates one disease" notion of causality; their reliance on a charity-, as opposed to profit-, oriented conception of bacteriological research; and their refusal to "exploit" the resources of colonial outposts. Nicolle spent the last two decades of his life as the heretical advocate of his own mission: to "convert" those in Paris to his ideas.;Drawing together themes of poetic imagination, Catholicism, "civilization," centralization, charity, imperialism, and isolation, I map them onto Nicolle's changing bacteriological ideas to explore how science is informed by identity, ideology, and society. In analyzing the movement of science from "center" to "periphery," I suggest that France's cultural extension was not a unilateral, but a reciprocal, process, which challenged and altered the very definition of the civilizing mission. Twentieth century "scientific" medicine developed not separate from, but as part of, this broader cultural discourse.;Trained at the Pasteur Institute shortly after its 1888 opening, Nicolle was dispatched to North Africa to spread the gospel of pastorism as part of France's "civilizing mission." As director of the Pasteur Institute of Tunis from 1903-1936, he made original discoveries concerning disease etiology, epidemiology, and prophylaxis and travelled throughout North Africa, Europe, and South America, establishing centers of pastorian thought. Through these efforts and his involvement in public health, he expanded his institute's national power and international prestige. In 1928, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on typhus fever, which included his 1909 demonstration that the disease is transmitted between humans by the louse. |
