This book has traced the intellectual, social, and cultural history of bacteriology and laboratory medicine in British India. In the process of finding its home in India, bacteriology led to the creation of several new institutions and made unique intellectual connections with imperialism and tropical medicine. Bacteriology was introduced to India through a long public movement in which British physicians, scientists, and administrators as well as Indian elites participated. Several institutions, such as the Imperial Bacteriological Laboratory at Poona, which later moved to Mukteswar; the Pasteur institutes at Kasauli, Coonoor, Rangoon, Shillong, and Calcutta; and the Central Research Institute (Kasauli), were established. Along with these institutions, several provincial bacteriological laboratories functioned in the major cities and district towns, the most prominent among which were the Bacteriological Laboratory at Agra, the Plague Research Laboratory in Bombay, the King Institute at Guindy near Madras (Chennai), and the Cholera Research Laboratory in Calcutta. There were also administrative bodies, such as the IRFA and the Bacteriological Department of the GOI, that funded and administered bacteriological research in India.

From the end of the nineteenth century, India became a theater for bacteriological research and experimentation. Prominent scientists from France, Italy, Germany, and Britain visited India in search of an ideal field for experiments with germs and vaccines. Bacteriologists such as Koch, Haffkine, Hankin, Brunton, Leonard Rogers, Paul-Louis Simond, Lustig, Yersin, the Cunninghams (D. D. and John) conducted research in Indian institutes for different lengths of time.