Imperial Fever: Tropical Medicine, British Literature, and the Return to South America, 1880-1930 explores the ways in which British writers engaged with the new developments in tropical medicine in their fictional representations of tropical fever in the early twentieth century. With the British Empire undergoing its largest expansion through predominantly tropical regions of the globe between 1860 and 1920, the demand for 'tropical medicine' and specialized training in 'tropical diseases' was at the utmost importance. Scottish physician and bacteriologist Ronald Ross proclaimed, "Malaria is the greatest enemy of the explorer, the missionary, the planter, the merchant, the farmer, the soldier, the administrator, the villager and the poor; and has…profoundly modified the world's history by tending to render the whole of the tropics comparatively unsuitable for the full development of civilization" (Prevention vii). Medical and scientific journals celebrated new discoveries made in tropical disease transmission and immunity, and promoted the study of tropical medicine. The opening of the tropics to British investment and re-settlement that tropical medicine now made possible captured the British imagination. The three British writers examined in Imperial Fever - Arthur Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh - engage with the colonial optimism, reservation, and anxiety inspired by the medical sciences in their depictions of modern British travelers combating tropical diseases and conquering the unruly terrain and indigenous populations of South America. Imperial Fever examines the ways in which developments in tropical medicine shaped British cultural and imperial identity as a growing tropical empire in the early years of the twentieth century.