transformed, with the fields of public health and surgery undergoing a complete rejuvenation’.1 To him the rise of medical bacteriology seemed pivotal to a transformation from hospital-based to laboratory-based medicine that characterised late nineteenth-century medicine. With the advent of medical bacteriology the laboratory revolution in medicine which had taken its departure in basic medical sciences was brought to matter at the bedside, in urban sanitation and in household

trypanosomiasis, one would hardly expect detailed worldwide coverage, and Neill does mention certain key figures and developments in Asia and the Americas. But the silence on the extensive contacts between the Brazilian scientist Carlos Chagas, who discovered American trypanosomiasis in 1909, and his European counterparts working on African trypanosomiasis at precisely the same time is disappointing. Chagas first published his finding in the journal of the Hamburg tropical medicine institute and was in close communication with several leading German protozoologists.1 Yet Neill overlooks Chagas and relegates Brazil’s notable role in the international rise of tropical medicine to an aside. Including this dimension—and understanding the global character of scientists’ interchanges beyond the ‘international’ European-imperial theatre—would add an important interpretive lens to this otherwise excellent work. In sum, and my lament notwithstanding, this is a learned and impressive volume, which should become a new classic for the field.