Originally published in 1988, the essays in this book focus primarily on colonial medicine in the British Empire but comparative material on the experience of France and Germany is also included. The authors show how medicine served as an instrument of empire, as well as constituting an imperializing cultural force in itself, reflecting in different contexts, the objectives of European expansion – whether to conquer, to occupy or to settle. With chapters from a distinguished array of social and medical historians, colonial medicine is examined in its topical, regional and professional diversity. Ranging from tropical to temperate regions, from 18th Century colonial America to 20th Century South Africa, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of the influence of European medicine on imperial history.
Before the nineteenth century, European soldiers serving in the tropics died from disease at a rate several times higher than that of soldiers serving at home. Then, from about 1815 to 1914, the death rates of European soliders, both those serving at home and abroad, dropped by nearly 90%. But this drop applied mainly to soliders in barracks. Soldiers on campaign, especially in the tropics, continued to die from disease at rates as high as ever, in sharp contrast to the drop in barracks death rates. This book, first published in 1998, examines the practice of military medicine during the conquest of Africa, especially in the 1880s and 1890s. Curtin examines what was done, what was not done, and the impact of doctors' successes and failures on the willingness of Europeans to embark on imperial adventures.
The history of modern medicine is inseparable from the history of imperialism. Medicine and Empire provides an introduction to this shared history – spanning three centuries and covering British, French and Spanish imperial histories in Africa, Asia and America. Exploring the major developments in European medicine from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century, Pratik Chakrabarti shows that the major developments in European medicine had a colonial counterpart and were closely intertwined with European activities overseas: - The increasing influence of natural history on medicine - The growth of European drug markets - The rise of surgeons in status - Ideas of race and racism - Advancements in sanitation and public health - The expansion of the modern quarantine system - The emergence of Germ theory and global vaccination campaigns Drawing on recent scholarship and primary texts, this book narrates a mutually constitutive history in which medicine was both a 'tool' and a product of imperialism, and provides an original, accessible insight into the deep historical roots of the problems that plague global health today.
In 1866 Patrick Manson, a young Scottish doctor fresh from medical school, left London to launch his career in China as a port surgeon for the Imperial Chinese Customs Service. For the next two decades, he served in this outpost of British power in the Far East, and extended the frontiers of British medicine. In 1899, at the twilight of his career and as the British Empire approached its zenith, he founded the London School of Tropical Medicine. For these contributions Manson would later be called the "father of British tropical medicine." In Imperial Medicine: Patrick Manson and the Conquest of Tropical Disease Douglas M. Haynes uses Manson's career to explore the role of British imperialism in the making of Victorian medicine and science. He challenges the categories of "home" and "empire" that have long informed accounts of British medicine and science, revealing a vastly more dynamic, dialectical relationship between the imperial metropole and periphery than has previously been recognized. Manson's decision to launch his career in China was no accident; the empire provided a critical source of career opportunities for a chronically overcrowded profession in Britain. And Manson used the London media's interest in the empire to advance his scientific agenda, including the discovery of the transmission of malaria in 1898, which he portrayed as British science. The empire not only created a demand for practitioners but also enhanced the presence of British medicine throughout the world. Haynes documents how the empire subsidized research science at the London School of Tropical Medicine and elsewhere in Britain in the early twentieth century. By illuminating the historical enmeshment of Victorian medicine and science in Britain's imperial project, Imperial Medicine identifies the present-day privileged distribution of specialist knowledge about disease with the lingering consequences of European imperialism.
A sweeping global history that looks beyond European urban centers to show how slavery, colonialism, and war propelled the development of modern medicine. Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of LondonÕs 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence NightingaleÕs contributions to the care of soldiers in the Crimean War revolutionized medical hygiene, transforming hospitals from crucibles of infection to sanctuaries of recuperation. Yet histories of individual innovators ignore many key sources of medical knowledge, especially when it comes to the science of infectious disease. Reexamining the foundations of modern medicine, Jim Downs shows that the study of infectious disease depended crucially on the unrecognized contributions of nonconsenting subjectsÑconscripted soldiers, enslaved people, and subjects of empire. Plantations, slave ships, and battlefields were the laboratories in which physicians came to understand the spread of disease. Military doctors learned about the importance of air quality by monitoring Africans confined to the bottom of slave ships. Statisticians charted cholera outbreaks by surveilling Muslims in British-dominated territories returning from their annual pilgrimage. The field hospitals of the Crimean War and the US Civil War were carefully observed experiments in disease transmission. The scientific knowledge derived from discarding and exploiting human life is now the basis of our ability to protect humanity from epidemics. Boldly argued and eye-opening, Maladies of Empire gives a full account of the true price of medical progress.
In recent years it has become apparent that the interaction of imperialism with disease, medical research, and the administration of health policies is considerably more complex. This book reflects the breadth and interdisciplinary range of current scholarship applied to a variety of imperial experiences in different continents. Common themes and widely applicable modes of analysis emerge include the confrontation between indigenous and western medical systems, the role of medicine in war and resistance, and the nature of approaches to mental health. The book identifies disease and medicine as a site of contact, conflict and possible eventual convergence between western rulers and indigenous peoples, and illustrates the contradictions and rivalries within the imperial order. The causes and consequences of this rapid transition from white man's medicine to public health during the latter decades of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth centuries are touched upon. By the late 1850s, each of the presidency towns of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras could boast its own 'asylum for the European insane'; about twenty 'native lunatic asylums' had been established in provincial towns. To many nineteenth-century British medical officers smallpox was 'the scourge of India'. Following the British discovery in 1901 of a major sleeping sickness epidemic in Uganda, King Leopold of Belgium invited the recently established Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine to examine his Congo Free State. Cholera claimed its victims from all levels of society, including Americans, prominent Filipinos, Chinese, and Spaniards.
Topics include the effects of disease and medicine on people at different levels of Roman society, the role of the physician in the Roman army, contraception, drugs, surgery, and magic. Jackson (curator, Department of Pre-historic and Romano-British antiquities, British Museum) adds evidence from excavations, sculptures, reliefs, vases, and wall-paintings to the testimony of ancient medical authors. Fascinating and chilling. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
An innovative, interdisciplinary study of why leprosy, a disease with a very low level of infection, has repeatedly provoked revulsion and fear. Rod Edmond explores, in particular, how these reactions were refashioned in the modern colonial period. Beginning as a medical history, the book broadens into an examination of how Britain and its colonies responded to the believed spread of leprosy. Across the empire this involved isolating victims of the disease in 'colonies', often on offshore islands. Discussion of the segregation of lepers is then extended to analogous examples of this practice, which, it is argued, has been an essential part of the repertoire of colonialism in the modern period. The book also examines literary representations of leprosy in Romantic, Victorian and twentieth-century writing, and concludes with a discussion of traveller-writers such as R. L. Stevenson and Graham Greene who described and fictionalised their experience of staying in a leper colony.
Medicine in an age of Commerce and Empire explores the impact of commercial and imperial expansion on British medicine from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century.
