Relocating Pastorian Medicine: Accommodation and Acclimatization of Pastorian Practices against Smallpox at the Pasteur Institute of Chengdu, China, 1908–1927

Abstract

ArgumentRevising the diffusionist view of current scholarship on the Pasteur Institutes in China, this paper demonstrates the ways in which local networks and circumstances informed the circulation and construction of knowledge and practices relating to smallpox prophylaxis in the Southwest of China during the early twentieth century. I argue that the Pasteur Institute of Chengdu did not operate in a natural continuity with the preceding local French medical institutions, but rather presented an intentional break from them. This Institute, as the first established by the French in China, strove for political and administrative independence both from the Chinese authority and from the Catholic Church. Yet, its operation realized political independence only partially. The founding of this Institute was also an attempt to satisfy the medical demand for local vaccine production. However, even though the Institute succeeded at producing the Jennerian vaccine locally, its production needed to accommodate local conditions pertaining to the climate, vaccine strains, and animals. Furthermore, vaccination had to conform to Chinese variolation, including its social and medical practices, in order to achieve the collaboration of local Chinese traditional practitioners with French colonial physicians, who were Pastorian-trained and worked at the Pasteur Institute of Chengdu. Thus the nature of the Pastorian work in Chengdu was not an imposition of foreign standards and practices, but rather a mutual compromise and collaboration between the French and the Chinese.

Recent Advances in Enzyme Immobilization in Nanomaterials

“…He labeled the enzyme as "zymase" which carried out the sucrose fermentation. [30] According to Buchner's following example, most enzymes are labeled based on the reactions which they conduct: the substrate name combined with the suffix-use (e.g., lactase DNA polymerase) [31].…”

Pasteur and “motivated” research

“…Pasteur's era was, of course, that of the colonization of the world, based on the idea of the "generosity" of the French Revolution, which implied that France brought about universal values, essential for all peoples. But the Pastorian vision, which was perceptible in the behavior of many of the physicians recruited by Pasteur to conduct research on diseases in distant countries, was significantly different and very original for the time: it did not have the idea of imposing a way of doing things, but on the contrary, assumed learning by doing [8]. These countries knew nothing of Western cultures and any creation of a local structure implied an anthropological vision in which even a rudimentary knowledge of the history of local civilizations was essential.…”

“…This Pastorian way of taking into account local civilizations is particularly well illustrated in the case of China [8]. Because of France's participation in the military occupation of that country, the presence of French medicine there was important at the beginning of the 20th century, at a time when the idea of spreading the concepts of Pasteur's vision was at its peak.…”