Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (review)

In an ambitious investigation, Joyce Chaplin asks how the technological, medical, and scientific knowledge and accomplishments of the English from 1500 to 1676 informed their assessment of and interaction with nature in the New World, particularly human nature. She surveys a wide range of colonial sources, especially from New England, and concludes that the first English commentators and colonizers respected the Amerindians and their ability to survive in the wilderness of North America, including the Arctic; however, by 1676 the English on both sides of the Atlantic disdained them as primitive and culturally deficient. This change resulted not from the prolific scientific activities and social changes that occurred simultaneously in England, but from colonial experiences of health and illness. Because the colonists did not experience environmentally induced transmutation (physiological change within a species) upon migration, and because they remained impervious to the virgin soil epidemics that decimated many Indian tribes, they determined that they were physiologically different from and superior to Indians—an intellectual shift that constituted the birth of racism. The English then extended their superiority from their bodies outward to conclude that the Indians were inferior in culture as well.

This argument raises important questions about the role of medicine in early modern British colonialism. How did the English, who believed that the environment controlled most of the differences between peoples, anticipate the effects of radical environmental change? How did they meet that challenge? Did their experience alter how they looked at themselves and the New World, particularly its aboriginal humans? Unfortunately, Chaplin fails to convincingly answer these questions owing to an evident lack of understanding of the complexities of early modern medicine, particularly the importance of the non-naturals and how they shaped English lifestyle. For example, in chapter 4 she discusses the Hippocratic premise that climate contributed to human variation. She points out the colonists' great fear of transmutation, and concludes that they soon realized the climate to be ineffective against their innately superior constitutions. In fact, transmutation remained a very real possibility at least until the second half of the eighteenth century,¹ but colonists believed they could control it by manipulating the other non-naturals (food, sleep, exercise, emotions, and emptiness and repletion). Dozens of vernacular health texts published during this period explained how the non-naturals worked together and how the negative effects of one could be mitigated through the others. In addition, the English believed that they could change the climate with their agricultural practices and other improvements. Success in maintaining English identity, then, was a testament to English medicine, lifestyle, and technology, not to physiological superiority.

In anachronistically privileging infection, the argument on virgin soil epidemics ignores the importance of the non-naturals in etiology. Although mortality rates remained low in New England, those in Virginia were extremely high for several decades. Chaplin seems to rely on the conclusions of historians that Indian mortality resulted from contagious diseases such as smallpox and measles, and that deaths in Virginia arose from other causes such as malaria and poor living conditions. This difference would not have been so readily apparent to the colonists. In fact, common understanding posited foods as the major cause of diseases: they were inappropriate, eaten improperly, or eaten to excess.

In not accounting for the dependence of health on lifestyle, Subject Matter misses an essential ingredient of the early modern relationship between medicine and empire. Only by demonstrating that the English came to believe that lifestyle had no effect on health, or that English and Indian lifestyles were equivalent, could its thesis of physiological superiority and racism be believable. Such a demonstration would be an extremely difficult, if not impossible, task.