Colonial Medicine

Summary

Colonial medicine encompasses the medical practices, institutions, and health consequences that accompanied European colonization from the sixteenth century onward. It is not a single tradition but a set of encounters: colonizers brought their own medical systems (Galenic, Paracelsian, heroic) into contact with indigenous healing practices; epidemic diseases devastated populations with no resistance; and colonial administrations used medicine as an instrument of control, cultural transformation, and occasionally genuine public health. The American colonies at the start of the Revolution had probably not two hundred medical graduates. The British colonial state brought vaccination and hospitals to India but did not cause the wholesale collapse of Ayurveda, Unani, or Siddha medicine. Colonial disease-control measures often backfired: hospitals served as disease transmission centers. The legacy of colonial medicine endures in contemporary global health, where biomedical standards developed through colonial interventions mask social and economic determinants of health.

American Colonial Medicine

The Transplanted Traditions

Colonists brought Galenic herbal and Paracelsian chemical traditions to America; the latter was dominant by the early eighteenth century.(Holmes, 1891) Individuals of an inquiring habit of mind, persons skilled in woodcraft, and expert housewives learned the use of medicinal plants from forests and neglected fields, acquiring much invaluable knowledge.(Wilder, 1901) The 1643 Winthrop Papers manuscript shows a blend of herbal simples, mineral drugs, and mystical remedies.(Holmes, 1891)

At the start of the American Revolution, there were probably not two hundred medical graduates and fewer than three hundred and fifty liberally educated practitioners in the colonies.(Edward H. Clarke et al., 1876) Clergymen served dual roles as pastors and physicians — the “Angelical Conjunction.”(Holmes, 1891) Medicine could only develop when separated from divinity; Cotton Mather’s manuscript mixed theology with medicine.(Holmes, 1891) Giles Firmin’s anatomy lectures were the first scientific teachings in the New World.(Holmes, 1891)

The Rejection of Local Knowledge

Fifty or more of the first hundred Plymouth colonists died; barely one thousand of seventy-five hundred Jamestown colonists survived by 1625.(Griggs, 1981) Yet racial prejudice prevented the transfer of Native American herbal knowledge; Winthrop’s comment on smallpox among the Indians reflected the colonists’ inability to learn from indigenous medical practice.(Griggs, 1981) The 1665 Quebec Ursuline nuns’ pharmacy list was almost entirely Old World drugs despite the local abundance of medicinal plants.(Griggs, 1981)

A 1746 Virginia physician’s inventory contained only sweet flag as possibly North American; the rest was imported European drugs.(Griggs, 1981) The Valley Forge emergency pharmacopoeia listed only three of forty-eight vegetable drugs as indigenous: sassafras, Virginia snakeroot, and butternut.(Griggs, 1981) William Byrd refused local doctors as “discarded Surgeons of Ships” and used dogwood bark for malaria.(Griggs, 1981)

Heroic Practice in the Colonies

A Boston doctor summarized colonial therapeutics: “bleeding, vomiting, blistering, purging, anodyne… repetendi, and finally murderandi.”(Griggs, 1981) Rush treated Drinker for dysentery in 1807 with repeated bleedings, blisters, enemas, and opium.(Griggs, 1981) Dr. Holyoke in 1797 declared “Mercury, Antimony, Bark and Opium” equal to all the rest.(Griggs, 1981)

Inoculation and Cultural Exchange

Cotton Mather introduced smallpox inoculation from African sources despite physician resistance.(Holmes, 1891) Massachusetts physicians maintained rationalism during the witchcraft delusions.(Holmes, 1891) Edward Winslow treated the sick Massasoit with washing, tongue scraping, and broth; the grateful chief revealed a plot against the settlers.(Holmes, 1891)

Smallpox inoculation derived from non-European practices in West Africa and the Ottoman Empire and received government support for programmes around the Western world from the 1720s onward; the execution of this prophylactic measure was nonetheless resisted in many areas, so that inoculation sometimes had to be forcibly imposed.(Jackson (ed.), 2011)

The African contribution to American public medicine was more substantial than the colonist narrative acknowledged. In 1721, an enslaved African named Onesimus taught Cotton Mather the African technique of smallpox inoculation, which had been in widespread use in Africa before Western medicine adopted it; the practice reduced smallpox mortality in Boston from fourteen percent to under two percent, with one in nine untreated patients dying compared with one in forty-eight among those inoculated.(Washington, Harriet A., 2006) Thirty years later, in 1751, a South Carolina enslaved physician named Cesar developed an effective snakebite antidote using plantain, horehound, sassafras, wood ashes, and tobacco; his cure was published in the South Carolina Gazette as a public service, reprinted widely, issued as a monograph in 1789, and his medical acumen earned him freedom from the South Carolina General Assembly along with an annual pension of one hundred pounds.(Washington, Harriet A., 2006) These cases illustrate the pattern Fett documents at length: African and African American medical knowledge moved into white colonial medicine through extraction, while the systems of knowledge and the people who held them were rarely credited or compensated.

Plantation Medicine and Enslaved Healing

Enslaved African Americans were not passive victims of medicine but cultivated a rich health culture with their own practitioners, therapies, and botanical expertise, drawing on Igbo, Yoruba, Bambara, Kongo, and other African healing systems transformed under New World conditions, as well as Native American and European influences.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)

Soundness and the Chattel Body

The dominant white slaveholder definition of slave health was “soundness,” measuring an enslaved person’s capacity to labor, reproduce, and obey, directly tied to market value.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) White doctors participated actively in the slave trade by examining enslaved bodies and issuing certificates of soundness in slave sales, courtrooms, and insurance transactions.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Slaveholders measured the soundness of enslaved women on a dual scale of both productive and reproductive labor, as the market value of slave women of childbearing age rested in their ability to work the fields and bear new generations of wealth.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Some physicians argued that amputation or other drastic interventions were more acceptable in enslaved patients than in free white patients, reasoning that amputation to a slave was “a matter of comparatively little importance.”(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Slave life insurance policies subjected enslaved persons to medical examination for profit, with premiums double those for free persons.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)

The Alternative Health Culture

Within enslaved communities, a relational vision of health connected individual well-being to community relationships, spiritual power, and ancestral connection, providing a framework fundamentally different from the commodity logic of soundness.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) African American distrust of white medical institutions had rational origins in three centuries of medical abuse, forced experimentation, and the instrumentalization of Black bodies.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Enslaved healers grounded their authority in spiritual calling, divine revelation, ancestral wisdom, and dreams, legitimizing their practice through sources white physicians could neither access nor discredit on medical grounds.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) The Kongo tradition of minkisi, sacred medicines capable of both causing and removing sickness, was a central African source for African American conjuration.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) White slaveholders used the concept of “superstition” as a racial ideology to discredit this tradition, conflating race, religion, and medical competence in a single dismissal.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) The ritual treatment of the dead was spiritually central to African-based healing traditions: ancestral intercession was considered essential to health, and many enslaved people reviled Western medicine not because they misunderstood it but because they understood it correctly — physicians appropriated Black bodies for display and dissection after death, desecrating what the African healing framework understood as the necessary precondition for ancestral protection of the living.(Washington, Harriet A., 2006)

Herbal Knowledge and Cross-Cultural Exchange

Southern herbal medicine was characterized by high cross-cultural exchange across lines of race, ethnicity, class, and region, with remedies borrowed, purchased, and stolen.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Several enslaved male healers in colonial Virginia and South Carolina were manumitted in exchange for herbal secrets, revealing that English colonists recognized real value in African American herbalism while restricting access to manumission to enslaved men only.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) African American herbal practice was a sophisticated body of knowledge requiring identification of plants at various stages of growth, knowledge of timing and lunar cycles, selection of specific plant parts, and appropriate dosing.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Practitioners used a blood-centered diagnostic system assessing qualities of blood as high/low, thick/thin, fast/slow, hot/cold, pure/impure, drawing on both African therapeutic precedents and European humoral theory, and prescribed medicines to bring the blood back into equilibrium, with sassafras root tea as the most popular blood-cleansing remedy.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)

Women, Midwifery, and Sickcare

Enslaved women’s healing work embodied a contradiction between skill and servitude: their labor was indispensable to plantation medical care yet was structurally devalued by the systems that depended on it.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Midwifery afforded enslaved women unusual mobility across plantation boundaries, enabling travel to Black and white households alike and giving them a form of geographic freedom that other enslaved persons did not possess.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Within enslaved communities, older women healers held authority grounded in spiritual empowerment, elder respect, and herbal knowledge transmitted through fireside apprenticeship after the workday ended.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)

The Distorted Medical Relationship

Slavery transformed the physician-patient dyad into a three-way relationship among patient, physician, and slaveholder, in which the enslaved person’s interests were structurally subordinated to the slaveholder’s economic calculations.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) J. Marion Sims conducted experimental surgery on a small group of enslaved women in Montgomery, Alabama between 1845 and 1849 to develop the repair of vesicovaginal fistulae, operating repeatedly on patients who could not refuse.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Southern medical schools relied on free and enslaved African Americans as specimens for teaching, observation, and experimentation.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Virginia enacted the most aggressive medicine laws in the Southeast: a 1748 statute made it a capital offense for any enslaved person to administer medicine, reflecting slaveholder fear that healing knowledge could be turned to poisoning.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002)

Resistance and Racial Medicine

Feigned illness was a widespread and strategic form of resistance, operating through the triadic relationship in which enslaved persons exploited the diagnostic uncertainty that slaveholders and physicians could never fully resolve.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Samuel Cartwright pathologized Black resistance to slavery as disease itself, naming the impulse to escape “drapetomania” and persistent labor avoidance “dysaesthesia aethiopica,” medicalizing political resistance into a diagnostic category.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) Virginia enacted the most aggressive medicine laws in the Southeast: a 1748 statute made it a capital offense for any enslaved or free Black person to “prepare, exhibit, or administer any medicine whatsoever” without slaveholder consent, on the lawmakers’ premise that “many negroes, under pretence of practising physic, have prepared and exhibited poisonous medicines.” Though penalties moderated by 1843, the law remained in force through the Civil War, illustrating the colonial state’s structural fear of autonomous Black medical authority.(Fett, Sharla M., 2002) After Congress banned the importation of African-born slaves in 1808, Cooper Owens documents, U.S. slaveholders’ interest in increasing slave births domestically expanded reproductive medicine alongside slavery, integrating the rising profitability of the slave-based nation with the rapid development of gynecology as a colonial-medical discipline.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017) The pioneering antebellum gynecological surgeons, she argues, were not exceptionally cruel individuals; they were elite white men working within a culture of scientific racism in which enslaved women were a vulnerable population available because of the easy access slavery provided to their bodies.(Cooper Owens, Deirdre, 2017)

Colonial Medicine in Latin America

The Catholic Church heavily influenced medical and public health in Latin American colonies without displacing traditional practitioners.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Spanish colonists incorporated Aztec plants into the colonial pharmacopoeia because their properties fit humoral conceptions.(Francia, 2014)

Pre-Columbian populations in the Americas maintained hygienic practices and infant-feeding regimes that supported health outcomes superior to contemporary European standards; best estimates suggest that their life expectancy at birth was approximately ten years longer than that of medieval Europeans, a gap that the epidemiological catastrophe of conquest and colonization rapidly reversed.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) The Mexica kept the streets, markets, and plazas of Tenochtitlan conspicuously clean through regular refuse collection and extensive sanitary and hygienic measures before the Spanish conquest; after Tenochtitlan was destroyed and rebuilt as Mexico City under Spanish rule, Lake Texcoco was transformed into a giant cesspool, with damaging consequences for the health of the city’s population.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) In 1803, Charles IV, the Bourbon King of Spain, having lost a child to smallpox, sponsored an extraordinary expedition throughout the Spanish Empire led by Francisco Javier Balmis and José Salvany to carry the Jenner vaccine; because there was no means of preserving the vaccine, it was administered live — arm to arm — preserved in the bodies of twenty-one Spanish orphans.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Spain had organized an earlier 1804 Balmis maritime vaccination expedition throughout its American and Asiatic dominions.(Crookshank, Edgar M., 1889)

Rockefeller Foundation campaigns in Latin America reflected US geopolitical interests, creating tensions with local cultures.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Contemporary Latin American health inequalities reflect colonial epidemic control legacies.(Jackson (ed.), 2011)

The Caribbean as Black Atlantic Medical Space

Pablo Gómez’s The Experiential Caribbean recovers a colonial medical world that scholars long mistook for a backwater of European medicine. The demographic context matters for understanding the medical landscape: between 55 percent and 90 percent of the Amerindian population disappeared in Caribbean rural spaces during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries due to Old World epidemics and the brutality of the encomienda system.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) The population that replaced them was overwhelmingly African. Throughout the seventeenth century, Caribbean cities and their hinterlands were predominantly Black spaces; Africans and their descendants composed more than three-quarters of the population, and Spanish America was second only to Brazil in the number of forced immigrants it received during the early modern era.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) Black women and men in Caribbean cities served as innkeepers, healers, food providers, surgeons, sex workers, sailors, dockworkers, blacksmiths, and other tradespeople; some enslaved practitioners earned and kept fees that funded their manumission. Ana Ramírez received up to fifty doblones for her practices in La Habana; the midwife Ana de la Cruz charged four pesos around 1638 for attending a birth.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) Throughout the long seventeenth century (roughly 1580–1720), Gómez identifies more than 102 ritual practitioners of African descent in surviving Spanish Caribbean documents; more than half were criollos born in the New World, with the next-largest groups born in Upper Guinea and West Central Africa.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)

Gómez argues that Black Caribbean ritual practitioners’ authority rested on experiential phenomena they manufactured anew from local circumstances, rather than on first principles, tradition, or dogma; their practice constituted an epistemological revolution that ran parallel to and in conversation with European New Science, not subordinate to it.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) In a deliberate methodological choice, Gómez refers to these practitioners as mohanes — a term of Amerindian origin first recorded in seventeenth-century New Granada and defined by Inquisition scribes as un maestro de hechizeros (“a master of sorcerers”) — rather than as witches, sorcerers, or shamans, language that betokens contemporaries’ efforts to isolate Black ways of knowing from “rational” knowledge production.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) During the seventeenth century, he writes, Black mohanes “led an epistemological revolution in which the experiential replaced first principles as the basis for Caribbean ways of knowing truths about the natural world,” a shift that ran ahead of analogous developments in European thought.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)

The formal medical infrastructure of the Spanish Caribbean included both licensed physicians and the pharmacies of religious orders. Don Alonso Coronado Maldonado, treated by nine licensed physicians in Panama around 1610, encountered a Galenic vocabulary — “urine sicknesses and hot liver distemper,” faulty “coction of food,” bad “quilo,” “corrimientos,” and Galen’s “extilicidimis” — that few Caribbean denizens other than specialized healers would have understood.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) Religious-order pharmacies dominated medicinal supply in Caribbean cities; Jesuits, Franciscans, Augustinians, Dominicans, and the Brothers of San Juan de Dios all operated documented pharmacies, and when the Jesuit pharmacy in Cartagena was inventoried during the order’s 1767 expulsion, it contained medicines coming from Asia, Africa, Europe, and the rest of the Americas.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) The 1666 inventory of medicines supplied by apothecary Doña Thomasa Árias Navarro to slave traders in Portobelo and the 1683–86 list of medicines used to treat slaves in Dutch Guyana are remarkably similar — both feature simples, Galenic compound preparations, and chemical/Paracelsian minerals — demonstrating that slave traders relied on a Galenic/Hippocratic therapeutic framework while remaining open to innovation.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)

Protective medicine was a separate layer of the Caribbean medical economy, neither Galenic nor African in strict origin but drawing on both. In 1658, a Habanera named María Gómez de Astorga declared in a self-incriminating Inquisition interview that she used a Caribbean protective bag specifically for protection against the arrival of new pestilences to the city — distinct from bolsas de Mandinga used to ward off the evil eye, accidents, or physical injury.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) The distinction matters: it shows that Caribbean residents had developed differentiated prophylactic material culture, with specific objects for specific threats, and that epidemic disease was understood as a distinct category requiring its own preventive response.

The 1651 Cartagena epidemic reveals how thoroughly Galenic medicine failed in Caribbean conditions. Physicians could not match the disease to anything in their books or in their experience; the rector of the Jesuit College recorded that the city’s doctors “got lost trying to comprehend the differences in the pulses that appeared” in the sick and dying, and “could not find either in the books they studied nor in the years of their experience any example of such a nefarious ailment.” Around 7,000 cartageneros died in what the Jesuits called the “butchery of death.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) In a marketplace where, as Gómez writes, “learned humoral medicine offered no more cures than alternative healing practices,” the protomedicato — the Spanish licensing body charged with regulating physicians, apothecaries, and surgeons — functioned less as a public-health authority and more as “a mere instrument of occupational control.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) Caribbean hospitals followed the same pattern. They were neither places of draconian social control nor highly individualized medical spaces; they were charity-framed institutions whose moralizing aspirations “remained largely unfulfilled” in their actual function. In Cartagena’s Hospital de San Sebastián, nine enslaved Black women and men cared for sick cartageneros, sailors, and slaves alongside ten Brothers of San Juan de Dios. At least one of them, Lázaro, healed autonomously; a 1663 hospital inventory records him as absent because he had traveled to a nearby village “to cure.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)

Diego López, born a slave in Cartagena around 1593, became a renowned mulato barber-surgeon. By the 1620s he undertook the long journey to Santa Fé de Bogotá to be officially licensed, and by 1640 he claimed to be “curing fifty people at the time.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) When Inquisitors told Juan de Alomera that “sticks, roots and leaves did not have natural virtue to preserve from spells,” Juan answered that “he can only believe by virtue of the experience he had with himself” and that the herbs would have “virtue to excuse and preserve from said spells” in any other person with the same circumstances; he was articulating a Caribbean experiential epistemology and an implicit universalism of bodies that ran ahead of any analogous European formulation.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) The Cartagena tribunal, Gómez notes, eventually became more lenient with such acts, increasingly treating sorcery as engaños (tricks) or boberías (silly things) rather than as demonic acts, so long as they did not menace Catholic and monarchic institutions.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) Domingo Congo summarized the structural relation in 1658 when he told the Inquisition that “the doctors of Caracas are my enemies because I heal the sick people they leave as incurable.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) The line between Galenic learned practitioners and the Mohanes was a porous and contested one. Juan Méndez Nieto, a Portuguese physician in Cartagena, recorded that the limpiadientes leaves used by “the Blacks and the people in the countryside” worked “better than wine and myrrh” and “frighten[ed] Galen” because they cured relaxed gums despite being “hot and dry in the third degree” — a direct contradiction of Galenic theory by experiential evidence the doctor could not explain away.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) The extraction of illness in the form of toads, worms, sticks, hairs, or insects from a patient’s body — practiced widely in Europe, Africa, and the Americas — was no less a “rational” method than the Galenic one for addressing afflictions of the internal or occult body.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) West Central Africans considered Catholic churches minkisi (power objects) and associated these spaces with the power of the dead beneath their floors; if Europeans saw the churches as sites for evangelization, the same buildings functioned as symbols of Africans’ cultural appropriation of Christian spaces.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)

Gómez closes his book with the 1816 inventory of the José Celestino Mutis–led botanical expedition. Between July and September of that year, José Fernández and a team of Spanish royal functionaries inventoried 104 boxes in Santa Fé de Bogotá containing thousands of paintings and descriptions collected over twenty-five years by natural historians, botanists, geographers, painters, royal functionaries, and “hundreds of empiric women and men.” Some of the plants the Mutis expedition “discovered” and “classified” were the same botanicals that seventeenth-century Black ritual practitioners like Mateo Arará had experientially tested decades earlier. The inventory, Gómez argues, reveals “the procedures by which European natural historians and philosophers subsumed and obscured the intellectual endeavors and techne created by early Caribbean communities under their own scientific rubrics.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) Empiricism, on his account, “was not necessarily Enlightened; neither was it uniquely modern, exclusively European, or intrinsically connected to the hard sciences.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)

Colonial Medicine in Africa and Asia

Sub-Saharan Africa

During the colonial period, African healers went underground or presented as herbalists due to the criminalization of witchcraft.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) The colonial legacy of medical experimentation causes negative responses to modern health interventions.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Racial, economic, and political factors determined medicine availability; racially based medical governance persisted post-independence.(Jackson (ed.), 2011)

European explorers called the African healer a “witch doctor,” a term that emphasized superstition over knowledge; later colonial observers shifted to the label “traditional healer,” but by emphasizing unchanging tradition this terminology denied African medicine a past or a future, making it a medicine without history for a people characterized as being without history.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Megan Vaughan argued that in Africa, European doctors were too thin on the ground and their instruments too blunt to be viewed either as liberators from disease or as agents of oppression, and that indigenous healing systems survived the colonial encounter and co-opted some features of Western medicine rather than being displaced by it.(Jackson (ed.), 2011)

Flint’s study of Natal (2008) reveals the mechanics in detail. Early encounters between Africans and Europeans involved genuine medical exchange — settlers adopted African remedies while African healers observed colonial techniques.(Flint, Karen E., 2008) The exchange moved in both directions: Africans incorporated European patent medicines into their pharmacopoeia, though they evaluated these imports by African therapeutic criteria, expecting remedies to taste bitter, act swiftly, and stimulate the bowels; a healer who failed to meet these expectations faced demands for refunds regardless of the biomedical result.(Flint, Karen E., 2008) But colonial authorities soon identified African diviners (isangomas) as political threats, criminalizing witch-finding in 1862 and licensing herbalists (inyangas) in 1891. The licensing system split the African healing community along categories the colonizers imposed: isangomas attempted to pass as licensed inyangas to avoid prosecution, and divination was driven from public ceremony into private consultation.(Flint, Karen E., 2008) Urbanization compounded this pressure differently: as Africans migrated to cities such as Durban in the 1930s, inyangas adapted by opening shops in commercial districts, listing themselves in directories as “native chemists,” and adopting stethoscopes and biomedical imagery in pamphlets while simultaneously invoking African therapeutic tradition, producing a hybrid commercial identity that neither colonial licensing categories nor biomedical institutions had anticipated.(Flint, Karen E., 2008) Courts reinforced these boundaries by defining “native medicines” as inherently static and indigenous, ruling in 1940 that an inyanga who incorporated Indian remedies and patent medicines was practicing outside his license — not because the treatments were harmful, but because they were not “characteristically native.”(Flint, Karen E., 2008)

South Asia

Colonial rule did not cause the wholesale collapse of Indian medical traditions; Ayurveda, Unani, and Siddha adapted and coexisted with Western medicine.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) The nineteenth-century British colonial state brought the first medical interventions: vaccination and hospitals or dispensaries.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Historiography has over-emphasized epidemic crisis narratives, neglecting long-term public health impacts.(Jackson (ed.), 2011)

Unani tibb was not a product of Mughal rule but had been established in India well before the Mughal period, introduced into the subcontinent by Arab traders and scholars as part of the medieval transmission of Galenic-Islamic medicine across the Indian Ocean world.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) The Native Medical Institution, founded in Calcutta in 1822 to teach elements of both European and Indian medicine, was wound up in 1835; from that point on, the state supported institutions for the teaching of Western medicine only.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) By 1900, thousands were graduating in Western medicine every year, and by the end of British rule in 1947, Western medicine was firmly established as the dominant form — a position it retained after independence.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) David Arnold showed how traumatic events such as the spread of cholera from its place of origin in deltaic Bengal were viewed by many peasants as symptomatic of the political chaos and dislocation caused by colonial territorial annexation.(Jackson (ed.), 2011)

Ayurvedic and Unani practitioners responded to colonial modernity not by retreating into tradition but by adapting its institutional forms: establishing colleges, hospitals, and pharmaceutical enterprises that adopted the organizational formats of Western biomedicine while maintaining their theoretical distinctiveness.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) This process of adaptive modernization preserved both systems as living practices rather than museum relics, and gave them the institutional infrastructure through which they would negotiate their place in independent India’s plural health system.

Australia and New Zealand

Australia and New Zealand differ as “white settler societies” — a category that unsettles standard colonial and postcolonial frameworks.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Unlike colonial encounters in South Asia and Africa, Australia and New Zealand quickly became societies in which newcomers numerically dominated indigenous people, producing a colonial historiography without the neat categories of “colonial” and “postcolonial” that apply elsewhere.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Indigenous health history and state interaction became the particular contribution of Australian and New Zealand medical historiography.(Jackson (ed.), 2011) Health history contributes to understanding national identity construction.(Jackson (ed.), 2011)

Derek Dow offered a nuanced account of New Zealand colonial health history that moved beyond both triumphalist and strictly critical narratives, using the phrase “benevolent self-interest” to describe some government health initiatives toward Maori, showing that Western medicine was neither simply a gift of civilization nor straightforwardly an instrument of domination.(Jackson (ed.), 2011)

Tropical Medicine and Disease

Tropical medicine arose from imperial powers’ needs, not as a natural scientific category.(Porter, 1997) Colonization spread tuberculosis, syphilis, measles, and smallpox to populations with no resistance, reducing some by ninety percent.(Porter, 1997) Quinine’s success on the 1854 Niger expedition meant Africa ceased being the “white man’s grave.”(Porter, 1997) Colonial disease-control measures often backfired: hospitals served as disease transmission centers.(Porter, 1997)

Ellis of Madras composed a fake Sanskrit poem about vaccination to deceive Brahmins — one of several “pious frauds” used to promote vaccination in colonial settings.(Crookshank, Edgar M., 1889) Nineteenth-century biomedical technologies were used experimentally on colonized peoples under the assumption of universal body interiors.(Margaret Lock and Vinh-Kim Nguyen, 2018) Biomedicine was standardized through colonial interventions establishing a doctrine of biological commensurability.(Margaret Lock and Vinh-Kim Nguyen, 2018) The colonial legacy endures in contemporary global health; biomedical standards mask social and economic determinants.(Margaret Lock and Vinh-Kim Nguyen, 2018)

Colonial bio-prospecting extracted medicinal plants while discarding the systems of knowledge that gave them meaning. Nineteenth-century US frontier medicine understood land in terms of “salubriousness” — a neo-Hippocratic tradition. Early social medicine scholarship was oblivious to eugenics, colonial contexts, and gendered structure.(Jackson (ed.), 2011)

See Also

• epidemic-disease
• cowpox
• heroic-medicine
• medical-pluralism
• herbal-medicine
• folk-medicine
• domestic-medicine
• race-and-medicine
• medical-experimentation

Sources

Evidence cards used in this entry: