Scientific Medicine in the Time of Cholera: the Johns Hopkins Ethos and US Friendly Power in North China, 1919

Abstract

Vashti Bartlett, a Johns Hopkins nurse and member of the American Red Cross Commission to Siberia, was part of a global expansion of United States (US) influence before and after World War I. Through close examination of Bartlett’s extensive personal archives and her experiences during a 1919 cholera epidemic in Harbin, North China, we show how an individual could embody a “friendly” or “capillary” form of imperialist US power. Significantly, we identify in Bartlett yet another form that US friendly power could take: scientific medicine. White, wealthy, female, and American, in the context of her international nursing activities Bartlett identified principally as a scientific practitioner trained at Johns Hopkins where she internalized a set of scientific ideals that we associate with a particular “Hopkins ethos.” Her overriding scientific identity rendered her a useful and conscientious agent of US friendship policies in China in 1919.