Imperial medicine and indigenous societies

David Arnold

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526162977
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editor’s Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: disease, medicine and empire
• 2 The European insane in British India, 1800–1858: a case study in psychiatry and colonial rule
• 3 Smallpox and colonial medicine in nineteenth-century India
• 4 Medicine and racial politics: changing images of the New Zealand Maori in the nineteenth century
• 5 Sleeping sickness epidemics and public health in the Belgian Congo
• 6 Cholera and the origins of the American sanitary order in the Philippines
• 7 Plague and the tensions of empire: India, 1896–1918
• 8 The influenza pandemic in Southern Rhodesia: a crisis of comprehension
• 9 Bilharzia: a problem of ‘Native Health’, 1900–1950
• 10 The discovery of colonial malnutrition between the wars
• Index