Medicine, Trade and Empire

Medicine, Trade and Empire
Author: Professor Palmira Fontes da Costa
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2015-06-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472431235

Garcia de Orta’s Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563) was printed in Goa, the capital of the Portuguese empire in the East and a port city that occupied a prominent role in the circuit of trade. Orta, a Portuguese physician who lived in Goa for thirty years, presents dialogues concerning more than eighty different drugs, fruits, spices, minerals and medical preparations, all of them native to India or observed in use there. This volume analyses the Colloquies, its history, context and reception, and its value to historians as a symbol of the impact of globalization in a sixteenth-century medical world.

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, Trade and Empire

Medicine, Trade and Empire
Author: Palmira Fontes da Costa
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2016-03-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 131709817X

Garcia de Orta’s Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (1563) was one of the first books to take advantage of the close relationship between medicine, trade and empire in the early modern period. The book was printed in Goa, the capital of the Portuguese empire in the East, and the city where the author, a Portuguese physician of Jewish ancestry, lived for almost thirty years. It presents a vast array of medical information on various drugs, spices, plants, fruits and minerals native to India or adjoining territories. In addition, it includes information concerning indigenous methods of healing as well as a far-reaching assessment of ancient and modern authors on Asian materia medica. Orta’s book had a market in Asia but was particularly valuable to a European audience. It soon attracted the attention of various European authors and printers by providing the basis for adaptations, commentaries and editions in various languages, prompting a successful and complex trail of medical knowledge in transit. Authored by an interdisciplinary team of prominent international scholars, the volume takes into account recent historiographical trends and provides a contextualized and innovative analysis of the histories and reception of the Colloquies. It emphasizes the value of the work to historians today as a symbol of the impact of geographical expansion and globalization in a sixteenth-century medical world.

A Medicated Empire

A Medicated Empire
Author: Timothy M. Yang
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2021-06-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501756257

In A Medicated Empire, Timothy M. Yang explores the history of Japan's pharmaceutical industry in the early twentieth century through a close account of Hoshi Pharmaceuticals, one of East Asia's most influential drug companies from the late 1910s through the early 1950s. Focusing on Hoshi's connections to Japan's emerging nation-state and empire, and on the ways in which it embraced an ideology of modern medicine as a humanitarian endeavor for greater social good, Yang shows how the industry promoted a hygienic, middle-class culture that was part of Japan's national development and imperial expansion. Yang makes clear that the company's fortunes had less to do with scientific breakthroughs and medical innovations than with Japan's web of social, political, and economic relations. He lays bare Hoshi's business strategies and its connections with politicians and bureaucrats, and he describes how public health authorities dismissed many of its products as placebos at best and poisons at worst. Hoshi, like other pharmaceutical companies of the time, depended on resources and markets opened up, often violently, through colonization. Combining global histories of business, medicine, and imperialism, A Medicated Empire shows how the development of the pharmaceutical industry simultaneously supported and subverted regimes of public health at home and abroad.

Merchants of Medicines

Merchants of Medicines
Author: Zachary Dorner
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2020-07-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 022670680X

The period from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century—the so-called long eighteenth century of English history—was a time of profound global change, marked by the expansion of intercontinental empires, long-distance trade, and human enslavement. It was also the moment when medicines, previously produced locally and in small batches, became global products. As greater numbers of British subjects struggled to survive overseas, more medicines than ever were manufactured and exported to help them. Most historical accounts, however, obscure the medicine trade’s dependence on slave labor, plantation agriculture, and colonial warfare. In Merchants of Medicines, Zachary Dorner follows the earliest industrial pharmaceuticals from their manufacture in the United Kingdom, across trade routes, and to the edges of empire, telling a story of what medicines were, what they did, and what they meant. He brings to life business, medical, and government records to evoke a vibrant early modern world of London laboratories, Caribbean estates, South Asian factories, New England timber camps, and ships at sea. In these settings, medicines were produced, distributed, and consumed in new ways to help confront challenges of distance, labor, and authority in colonial territories. Merchants of Medicines offers a new history of economic and medical development across early America, Britain, and South Asia, revealing the unsettlingly close ties among medicine, finance, warfare, and slavery that changed people’s expectations of their health and their bodies.

Medicine in an age of Commerce and Empire

Medicine in an age of Commerce and Empire
Author: Mark Harrison
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2010-09-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199577730

Medicine in an age of Commerce and Empire explores the impact of commercial and imperial expansion on British medicine from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century.

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.""

Maladies of Empire

Maladies of Empire
Author: Jim Downs
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0674971728

A sweeping global history that looks beyond European urban centers to show how slavery, colonialism, and war propelled the development of modern medicine. Most stories of medical progress come with ready-made heroes. John Snow traced the origins of LondonÕs 1854 cholera outbreak to a water pump, leading to the birth of epidemiology. Florence NightingaleÕs contributions to the care of soldiers in the Crimean War revolutionized medical hygiene, transforming hospitals from crucibles of infection to sanctuaries of recuperation. Yet histories of individual innovators ignore many key sources of medical knowledge, especially when it comes to the science of infectious disease. Reexamining the foundations of modern medicine, Jim Downs shows that the study of infectious disease depended crucially on the unrecognized contributions of nonconsenting subjectsÑconscripted soldiers, enslaved people, and subjects of empire. Plantations, slave ships, and battlefields were the laboratories in which physicians came to understand the spread of disease. Military doctors learned about the importance of air quality by monitoring Africans confined to the bottom of slave ships. Statisticians charted cholera outbreaks by surveilling Muslims in British-dominated territories returning from their annual pilgrimage. The field hospitals of the Crimean War and the US Civil War were carefully observed experiments in disease transmission. The scientific knowledge derived from discarding and exploiting human life is now the basis of our ability to protect humanity from epidemics. Boldly argued and eye-opening, Maladies of Empire gives a full account of the true price of medical progress.

American Business History

American Business History
Author: Walter A. Friedman
Publisher:
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2020
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0190622474

This introduction looks at the rise of the American economy from its colonial and frontier beginnings. What made the United States an attractive testing ground for entrepreneurs? How did the United States come to have the largest business enterprises in the world by the early twentieth century? Why did business organizations gain a central place in American society?

Disease and Empire

Disease and Empire
Author: Philip D. Curtin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 294
Release: 1998-05-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521598354

Before the nineteenth century, European soldiers serving in the tropics died from disease at a rate several times higher than that of soldiers serving at home. Then, from about 1815 to 1914, the death rates of European soliders, both those serving at home and abroad, dropped by nearly 90%. But this drop applied mainly to soliders in barracks. Soldiers on campaign, especially in the tropics, continued to die from disease at rates as high as ever, in sharp contrast to the drop in barracks death rates. This book, first published in 1998, examines the practice of military medicine during the conquest of Africa, especially in the 1880s and 1890s. Curtin examines what was done, what was not done, and the impact of doctors' successes and failures on the willingness of Europeans to embark on imperial adventures.