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Tainted Benevolence: Sources of Funding for the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine from 1898-1915

The final two decades of the nineteenth century saw a race among European powers to secure vast tracts of land in Africa for colonization and exploitation. However, the empires of the West soon found that effective occupation of this new continent would not end with a physical takeover. In order to benefit politically and financially from their new territories, colonial governments would have to confront a series of unforeseen challenges, one of the largest of which was the prevalence of so-called "tropical" diseases. Few doctors in Europe had any experience with or understanding of conditions from sleeping sickness to Guinea worm that ravaged settlers and natives alike in the “Dark Continent.” Thus, in 1898 a new school of medicine was founded in Great Britain with the noble mission of expanding knowledge of this new class of illnesses and saving lives in Africa and other newly colonized regions. Yet over its first seventeen years of operation, the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine continually accepted large donations from individuals whose interests certainly did not lie with humanitarian or scientific gain. This paper examines how the personal investments of the Liverpool School's donors impacted the direction of its efforts, and ultimately tainted its magnanimous aims.