This paper attempts to problematise the founding of 'Tropical Medicine' in the late 19th century as a classificatory act by posing a question: why was the discipline founded when it was and not earlier? In the process, it offers an alternate genealogy of its advent by arguing for a mid-19th century episteme, in terms of fevers, the constitution of the body, and the weather-in originating fevers and in predisposing the body towards disease—both in the temperates and the tropics, as being crucial to an understanding of the discourse on the tropics.
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