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13 Postcolonial Histories of Medicine
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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C H A P T E R T H I R T E E N Postcolonial Histories of Medicine Warwick Anderson In the first issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Henry E. Sigerist urged his readers to consider carefully the spatial distribution of disease, not just its history. Since the late nineteenth century, pathological and physiological studies in medicine had nudged aside investigations of geographical influences on the character and distribution of disease, except perhaps in the tropics. Similarly, while one place or another was presupposed in most histories of medicine, it had become unfashionable to accentuate the territorial limits, the situation, of historical subjects . Yet, as Sigerist insisted in 1933, ‘‘whenever we trace the history of a disease, we do it in a definite country. We cannot study the history of the Plague at large.’’ The history and geography of disease were always inseparable, and the nexus should be made clear. Sigerist hoped that the new journal would bring together the ‘‘good work’’ on these linked subjects from ‘‘all over the world,’’ but in this matter at least it was to prove sorely disappointing.1 Fielding H. Garrison, the glum representative of an older generation of American medical historians, may have differed in historical sensibility from Sigerist, yet he too shared the Swiss émigré’s interest in promoting a spatially informed, and dispersed, history of medicine. In 1932, the year before the founding of the Bulletin, Garrison argued that the medical historian of the future ‘‘will be con- 286 A Generation Reviewed cerned, not only with the achievement of a few advanced civilizations, but with the medicine and sanitation of the whole world.’’ Displaying his overpacked mind, Garrison then discussed the great nineteenth-century geographies of disease : Laveran on the distribution of paludism and trypanosomiasis; Rockefeller hookworm surveys; the pattern of illness in Russia after the revolution; effects of disease on settlement in the new world; Berber medicine in North Africa; and Tupi healing practices in Brazil. He reported at length on disease in the ‘‘Kenya colony’’ and speculated on the adaptability of the ‘‘Negro’’ to Western ways. He recalled the proceedings of the International Congress of Tropical Medicine, held in Singapore in 1923, which had indicated that the history of disease in the Torrid Zone was ‘‘by no means reducible to the pattern implicit in textbooks on tropical medicine . Each of these areas has, in fact, its own peculiar type of tropical medicine.’’2 After this patchy international comparison of disease distributions and medical interventions, Garrison went on to recommend the journals of anthropology and ethnology to aspiring medical historians. The global vision of Sigerist and Garrison seems sadly to have faded by the 1970s, when North American and European scholars wrote their manifestos for the social history of medicine. Admittedly, the interest of Sigerist and Garrison in other parts of the world—derived from an admiration of the great nineteenthcentury works of historical and geographical pathology, and expressed mostly in programmatic statements—always remained in tension with their own research, which concentrated still on the history of medical ideas and on scientific biography . For Sigerist, the history of Western medicine as an intellectual enterprise and the life stories of the great doctors certainly required social and geographical context , but the settings that fascinated him were found generally in Europe or, less frequently, in the neo-Europe of North America. With the emergence of the social history of medicine after World War II, and its proliferation during the 1970s, finegrained local or national studies, usually located in the West, became ever more common. Sigerist and Richard Shryock, his successor at Johns Hopkins, were often invoked as founders of the new social history of disease and health care. According to Susan Reverby and David Rosner, these precursors had prompted a ‘‘growing understanding of both the social causation of health and disease and the way in which science is embedded in society’s social relations.’’3 Through pioneering social histories, we would learn more and more about specific medical sites— laboratories, hospitals, community clinics, public health departments, to name a few—and gain a richer understanding of the social basis of health and healing. Even so, for many years the geographical ambit of conventional medical history [3.85.211.2] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:09 GMT) Postcolonial Histories 287 would not extend much beyond a few sites in western Europe and the United States east of the Mississippi. It is perhaps...