Medicine And Colonialism

Up to now far too little has been known about the influence and the effect of European medicine in colonies and not much has been known as yet about the introduction and activity of medical doctors, and public health in general, in the colony of German New Guinea. The present study examines for the first time in detail the measures and goals of the German colonial administration in relation to issues of public health. The activities of medical practitioners, medical orderlies and nurses are examined, as are problems with endemic tropical and introduced diseases, the reaction of the native population to European health measures, the training of native men as "Heiltultuls" and the efficacy of their deployment, and the introduction of western standards of hygiene. Margrit Davies scrutinises the interplay of public health and colonialism and attempts an answer to the question of how the especifically German variety of "colonial medicine" is to be evaluated.

Focusing on India and South Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the essays in this collection address power and enforced modernity as applied to medicine. Clashes between traditional methods of healing and the practices brought in by colonizers are explored across both territories.

This volume shows how the study of medicine can provide new insights into colonial identity, and the possibility of accomodating multiple perspectives on identity within a single narrative.

This book analyzes the diverse facets of the social history of health and medicine in colonial India. It explores a unique set of themes that capture the diversities of India, such as public health, medical institutions, mental illness and the politics and economics of colonialism. Based on inter-disciplinary research, the contributions offer valuable insight into topics that have recently received increased scholarly attention, including the use of opiates and the role of advertising in driving medical markets. The contributors, both established and emerging scholars in the field, incorporate sources ranging from palm leaf manuscripts to archival materials. This book will be of interest to scholars of history, especially the history of medicine and the history of colonialism and imperialism, sociology, social anthropology, cultural theory, and South Asian Studies, as well as to health workers and NGOs.

The history of medicine and disease in colonial India remains a dynamic and innovative field of research, covering many facets of health, from government policy to local therapeutics. This volume presents a selection of essays examining varied aspects of health and medicine as they relate to the political upheavals of the colonial era. These range from the micro-politics of medicine in princely states and institutions such as asylums through to the wider canvas of sanitary diplomacy as well as the meaning of modernity and modernization in the context of British rule. The volume reflects the diversity of the field and showcases exciting new scholarship from early-career researchers as well as more established scholars by bringing to light many locations and dimensions of medicine and modernity. The essays have several common themes and together offer important insights into South Asia’s experience of modernity in the years before independence. Cutting across modernity and colonialism, some of the key themes explored here include issues of race, gender, sexuality, law, mental health, famine, disease, religion, missionary medicine, medical research, tensions between and within different medical traditions and practices and India’s place in an international context. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of modern South Asian history, sociology, politics and anthropology as well as specialists in the history of medicine.

This book offers an innovative engagement with the diverse histories of colonial and indigenous medicines. Engagement with different kinds of colonialism and varied indigenous socio-political cultures has led to a wide range of approaches and increasingly distinct traditions of historical writing about colonial and indigenous modes of healing have emerged in the various regions formerly ruled by different colonial powers. The volume offers a much-needed opportunity to explore new conceptual perspectives and encourages critical reflection on how scholars’ research specialisms have influenced their approaches to the history of medicine and healing. The book includes contributions on different geographical regions in Asia, Africa and the Americas and within the varied contexts of Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Dutch and British colonialisms. It deals with issues such as internal colonialism, the plural history of objects, transregional circulation and entanglement, and the historicisation of medical historiography. The chapters in the volume explore the scope for conceptual interaction between authors from diverse disciplines and different regions, highlighting the synergies and thematic commonalities as well as differences and divergences.

The role of the Colonial Medical Service - the organisation responsible for healthcare in British overseas territories - goes to the heart of the British Colonial project. Practising Colonial Medicine is a unique study based on original sources and research into the work of doctors who served in East Africa. It shows the formulation of a distinct colonial identity based on factors of race, class, background, training and Colonial Service traditions, buttressed by professional skills and practice. Recruitment to the Medical Service bound its members to the Colonial Service ethos exemplified by the principles of the legendary Sir Ralph Furse, head of Colonial Office recruitment to the Service. Thus the Service was to be a corps d'élite consisting of Furse's 'good men' - self-reliant, practical, conscientious, professionally qualified people whose personalities were 'such as to command the respect and trust of the native inhabitants of the colony'. Professsional qualifications were important but 'secondary to character'. Anna Crozier analyses all aspects of recruitment, qualifications, training as well as the vital personal factors that shaped the Service's character - religion, a sense of adventure, professional interest, ideas of imperial service, family traditions, professional ties, perceptions of service to humanity and the building up of a common service mentality among colonial medical staff. This is the first comprehensive history of the Colonial Medical Service and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the social and cultural aspects of medical history.

This is a lively and original book, which treats Western biomedical discourse about illness in Africa as a cultural system that constructed "the African" out of widely varying, and sometimes improbable, materials. Referring mainly to British dependencies in East and Central Africa in the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, it draws on diverse sources ranging from court records and medical journals to fund-raising posters and "jungle doctor" cartoons. Curing Their Ills brings refreshing concreteness and dynamism to the discussion of European attitudes toward their others, as it traces the shifts and variations in medical discourse on African illness. Among the topics the book covers are the differences between missionary medicine, which emphasized individual responsibility for sin and disease, and secular medicine, which tended toward an ethnic model of collective pathology; leprosy and the construction of the social role of "the leper"; and the struggle to define insanity in a context of great ignorance about what the "normal African" was like and a determination to crush indigenous beliefs about bewitchment. The underlying assumption of this discourse was that disease was produced by the disintegration and degeneration of "tribal" cultures, which was seen to be occurring in the process of individualization and modernization. This was a cultural rather than a materialist model, the argument being that Africans were made sick not by the material changes to their lives and environment, but by their cultural "maladaptation" to modern life. The "scientific" discourse about the biological inferiority of "the African," traced by one school of scientists to defects in the frontal lobe, makes painful reading today; it persisted into the 1950s.