The Knights of Science: Medicine and Mythology

Abstract

In this chapter Taylor-Pirie examines how parasitologists invoked myths of British nationhood in their professional self-fashioning to frame themselves as knights of science fighting on behalf of Imperial Britain. Analysing scientific lectures, political speeches, letter correspondence, obituaries, medical biographies, and journalistic essays, she draws attention to the prominence of Arthurian legend and Greco-Roman mythology in conceptualisations of parasitology, arguing that such literary-linguistic practices sought to reimagine the relationship between medicine and empire by adapting historical and poetic models of chivalry. In this way, individual researchers were lionised as national heroes and their research framed as labour that could command the longevity of legendary stories like those recounted in Homeric poems and medieval romance. In acclimatisation debates, the tropics were frequently conceptualised in relation to the Greek Underworld, a suite of references that together with dragon slaying and the quest narrative helped to position parasitology as a type of ‘crusading fiction’ in the context of the Victorian medieval revival.