Framing Fever: Understanding Dengue in Colonial Hong Kong

Abstract

Hong Kong has a fevered history. This paper explores the history of dengue fever there, seeking to disentangle that disease from scholarship that has centralised ‘Hong Kong fever’ – tacitly understood to have been “mostly malaria”. Reading the colonial and medical archives ‘against the grain’, I explore socio-cultural imaginations and understandings of dengue in the decades leading up to its modern (or scientific) framing around 1900. Dengue provides a vantage for reflecting on ongoing debates in the history of medicine. How were disease entities constituted? By whom, by what methods, and with what motivations? How were assumptions on the role of the environment in disease aetiology reworked through the lens of the emerging discipline of tropical medicine? What variables govern the visibility of disease? Hong Kong provides an exemplary case study for engaging with such and other questions. This paper examines shifts in dengue’s framing against the backdrop of more general changes in theories of disease aetiology. Hong Kong, moreover, played a central role in the formation of a transhistorical and comprehensive ‘modern’, scientific, identity of dengue fever. Tracing conceptualisations of a background disease now ubiquitous in the tropical world, this paper provides a fresh historical perspective on a contemporary problem.