Medicine and Empire

Medicine and Empire
Author: Pratik Chakrabarti
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2013-12-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137374802

The history of modern medicine is inseparable from the history of imperialism. Medicine and Empire provides an introduction to this shared history – spanning three centuries and covering British, French and Spanish imperial histories in Africa, Asia and America. Exploring the major developments in European medicine from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century, Pratik Chakrabarti shows that the major developments in European medicine had a colonial counterpart and were closely intertwined with European activities overseas: - The increasing influence of natural history on medicine - The growth of European drug markets - The rise of surgeons in status - Ideas of race and racism - Advancements in sanitation and public health - The expansion of the modern quarantine system - The emergence of Germ theory and global vaccination campaigns Drawing on recent scholarship and primary texts, this book narrates a mutually constitutive history in which medicine was both a 'tool' and a product of imperialism, and provides an original, accessible insight into the deep historical roots of the problems that plague global health today.

Medicine and Public Health at the End of Empire

Medicine and Public Health at the End of Empire
Author: Howard Waitzkin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2015-11-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 131725614X

The recent financial meltdown has brought notable changes to the global practice of health care changes that have often escaped the American news media. Although Western managed-care corporations previously had strengthened their influence abroad, now many countries are considering new approaches to health care for their citizens.The untold story of how corporations have influenced global health care and the impacts now in America as the system rapidly shifts is Dr. Waitzkin s subject in his provocative new book. We now live in a new era in which the prospects for more humane approaches to health care are taking root. Strengthening access and improving public health are at the heart of the many previously little-noted struggles and actions by individuals, groups, and whole nations to put control back in the hands of patients and practitioners, as Americans of many political stripes seem to universally seek. The impacts of these changes in the United States are considerable, and they are amply illustrated by Dr. Waitzkin as the United States attempts to reorient its own system of care.Selected as the 2012 winner of the Freidson Outstanding Publication Award by the American Sociological Association for its "bold and timely analysis of the global political economy of contemporary crises in health and medical care. By presenting the lessons learned from social medicine (past and present), [it] outlines a macro-sociologically informed response to these crises.""

Disease, Medicine and Empire

Disease, Medicine and Empire
Author: Roy Macleod
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 394
Release: 2022-05-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000566153

Originally published in 1988, the essays in this book focus primarily on colonial medicine in the British Empire but comparative material on the experience of France and Germany is also included. The authors show how medicine served as an instrument of empire, as well as constituting an imperializing cultural force in itself, reflecting in different contexts, the objectives of European expansion – whether to conquer, to occupy or to settle. With chapters from a distinguished array of social and medical historians, colonial medicine is examined in its topical, regional and professional diversity. Ranging from tropical to temperate regions, from 18th Century colonial America to 20th Century South Africa, this book is an important contribution to our understanding of the influence of European medicine on imperial history.

Imperial medicine and indigenous societies

Imperial medicine and indigenous societies
Author: David Arnold
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1526162970

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.

Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire

Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire
Author: John Slater
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2016-04-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1317098382

Early modern Spain was a global empire in which a startling variety of medical cultures came into contact, and occasionally conflict, with one another. Spanish soldiers, ambassadors, missionaries, sailors, and emigrants of all sorts carried with them to the farthest reaches of the monarchy their own ideas about sickness and health. These ideas were, in turn, influenced by local cultures. This volume tells the story of encounters among medical cultures in the early modern Spanish empire. The twelve chapters draw upon a wide variety of sources, ranging from drama, poetry, and sermons to broadsheets, travel accounts, chronicles, and Inquisitorial documents; and it surveys a tremendous regional scope, from Mexico, to the Canary Islands, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, and Germany. Together, these essays propose a new interpretation of the circulation, reception, appropriation, and elaboration of ideas and practices related to sickness and health, sex, monstrosity, and death, in a historical moment marked by continuous cross-pollination among institutions and populations with a decided stake in the functioning and control of the human body. Ultimately, the volume discloses how medical cultures provided demographic, analytical, and even geographic tools that constituted a particular kind of map of knowledge and practice, upon which were plotted: the local utilities of pharmacological discoveries; cures for social unrest or decline; spaces for political and institutional struggle; and evolving understandings of monstrousness and normativity. Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire puts the history of early modern Spanish medicine on a new footing in the English-speaking world.

Difference and Disease

Difference and Disease
Author: Suman Seth
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2018-06-07
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1108304850

Before the nineteenth century, travellers who left Britain for the Americas, West Africa, India and elsewhere encountered a medical conundrum: why did they fall ill when they arrived, and why - if they recovered - did they never become so ill again? The widely accepted answer was that the newcomers needed to become 'seasoned to the climate'. Suman Seth explores forms of eighteenth-century medical knowledge, including conceptions of seasoning, showing how geographical location was essential to this knowledge and helped to define relationships between Britain and her far-flung colonies. In this period, debates raged between medical practitioners over whether diseases changed in different climes. Different diseases were deemed characteristic of different races and genders, and medical practitioners were thus deeply involved in contestations over race and the legitimacy of the abolitionist cause. In this innovative and engaging history, Seth offers dramatically new ways to understand the mutual shaping of medicine, race, and empire.

Public Health in the British Empire

Public Health in the British Empire
Author: Ryan Johnson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2012-03-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136596453

Over the last several decades, historians of public health in Britain’s colonies have been primarily concerned with the process of policy making in the upper echelons of the medical and sanitary administrations. Yet it was the lower level staff that formed the backbone of public health systems in the colonies. Although they constituted the bases of many colonies’ public health machinery, there is no consolidated study of these individuals to date. Public Health in the British Empire addresses this gap by bringing together historians studying intermediary and subordinate staff across the British Empire. Along with investigating the duties and responsibilities of medical and non-medical intermediary and subordinate personnel, the contributors to this volume show how the subjectivity of these agents influenced the manner in which they discharged their duties and how this in turn shaped policy. Even those working as low level assistants and aids were able to affect policy design. In this way, Public Health in the British Empire brings into sharp relief the disaggregated nature of the empire, thereby challenging the understanding of the imperial project as an enterprise conceived of and driven from the center.

Glimpses of Health and Medicine in Mauryan Empire

Glimpses of Health and Medicine in Mauryan Empire
Author: Dvsubba Reddy
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-07-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781019529331

Drawing on a wealth of historical and archaeological evidence, author D.V. Subba Reddy offers a fascinating glimpse into the medical practices of the Mauryan Empire, a powerful Indian dynasty that flourished in the 3rd century BCE. With a focus on the social and cultural context of medicine in this fascinating period of history, Glimpses of Health and Medicine is an illuminating read for anyone interested in the history of science and medicine. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.