Medicine and Colonial Identity (review)

This collection of essays is organized around the proposition that medicine has been "a key aspect of the cultural positioning by which colonists and colonized alike defined both themselves and the colonial other" (p. 6). During the past fifteen years, countless essays in the history of colonial medicine have appeared; this collection, however, is distinguished by its focus on the contributions of medical practice to identity formation. The editors fault other scholars of colonialism for concentrating wholly on either the recovery of "subaltern" voices or Foucauldian studies of the microphysics of state power. But as medicine is a site where various beliefs and institutions jostle together, its historians have a rare opportunity to reveal the actual complexity and messiness of colonial identity-formation and adaptation—they can "accommodate multiple perspectives within a single narrative" (p. 5). Even if the editors' claims of such medical exceptionalism cannot be sustained, they provide a convenient rationale for putting together six somewhat disparate, but nonetheless interesting, essays.

The more rewarding of these essays are in conversation with recent developments in colonial historiography. Maneesha Lal describes the efforts of the editor of Stri Darpan, a Hindu nationalist women's magazine, to combine in the early twentieth century two apparently distinct medical idioms, Ayurveda and Western medicine, in order to construct "strong bodily identities that could withstand the demands of nation building" (p. 22). Lal demonstrates clearly the importance of women in shaping an emerging national body. Moreover, she engages helpfully with Dipesh Chakrabarty's argument about the differentiation and deferral of hygienic modernity in India. In a later essay, Hilary Marland considers a similar colonial trajectory—the development of the modern midwife in the Dutch East Indies—but uses this example of identity-formation to discuss the difficulty of comparative study, not the emergence of a national body. Marland compares midwifery reform in the southern parts of the Netherlands with that in Java, arguing that there was little direct communication between these projects. Indeed, it seems that while similar problems were encountered in each place, the solutions in the East Indies were often more imaginative and effective, though hopelessly underfunded and rarely influential elsewhere. All the same, at both marginal sites, European and colonial, a modern image for midwives was created in the early twentieth century.

David Gordon and Roy MacLeod both focus on the logic of colonial medical careers. Gordon examines the medical practice of John P. Fitzgerald in New Zealand in the 1840s and the Cape for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Initially, Fitzgerald had a remarkably intense, and mutually respectful, interaction with Xhosa healers, but by the 1880s there was little reciprocity. Gordon concludes that this particular colonial medical career confirms David Arnold's claim that Western medicine might have become dominant in the nineteenth century, but it was far from hegemonic. MacLeod's contribution is a disappointingly slight, though elegantly written, essay on Australian medical biography.

The other two essays in this collection are concerned with the shaping of white settler identities in New Zealand and northern Australia. Philippa Mein Smith discusses milk as a cultural icon in New Zealand, and how medicos came to associate it with the production of strong British bodies. Suzanne Parry provides a wide-ranging account of the development of "medicalized" white male and Aboriginal bodies in tropical Australia during the early twentieth century. She is most persuasive when explaining the impact of tropical medicine on the way European settlers imagined themselves north of Capricorn; her estimates of medical influence on Aboriginal identity are far more speculative. (Sadly, this essay seems not to have been revised in the six or so years prior to publication—Parry refers to a 1995 book review as "recent"—and it therefore fails to engage with much genuinely new work on this subject.) It is interesting that both Mein Smith and Parry—alone among contributors to this volume—look closely at the medical framing of specifically racial...