It grew out of older discourses and experiences of illness in the colonies, flourished in research laboratories in Europe and was exported back to the colonies to tackle malaria, sleeping sickness, cholera and nutritional deficiencies.Īrguably once exported, it became a form of “colonial” medicine. “Tropical” medicine is seen as a discipline of medical science that developed in the late-nineteenth century to tackle the diseases of hot climates. Very few scholars consider whether the word “medicine” itself requires defining. These terms are not interchangeable, even if often used indiscriminately. Modern answers to the question of what colonial medicine isĪ survey of modern studies of colonial medicine suggests that there is a lack of precision about what “colonial medicine” is or was, and a lot of overlap exists with two other terms: “tropical medicine” and “imperial medicine”. Considering what was “colonial” about medicine in the Middle Ages will turn out to be a useful way to problematize chronologies and approaches in both Iberian and medical history. This essay will start by surveying modernist answers to Shula Marks's question, go on to explore debates about medieval colonialism, and end by considering the role of health and medicine in the medieval expansion of Europe with particular focus on Iberian conquests.
Yet as we will see below there is scholarship on medieval colonialism, a growing interest in a postcolonial and global Middle Ages, and for twenty years now the field of medieval medicine has burgeoned.Įven if the colonial medicine bandwagon is going in a different direction, it is worth jumping on for a bit to find out what medievalists can gain from it. By denying that the term “colonial medicine” can apply to earlier centuries, it suggests that there is something intrinsically modern about the term. With both empires, research rarely goes earlier than 1550. The early Spanish empire is more heavily researched, but Mexico receives by far the most attention. Their approach takes the Spanish and Portuguese empires more seriously but says little about healthcare.ĭespite the valiant efforts of a small group of researchers, medicine in the Portuguese empire could still be described as “chronically understudied” in 2013. In the case of both colonial and postcolonial medicine the focus of research in the English language is on the modern British Empire with occasional glances at other empires and some recent ventures into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.įor earlier periods, historians of science (botany, pharmacy, cosmography, navigation) have been much more prominent, developing important approaches to the construction and circulation of knowledge. Yet the history of colonial medicine shows no signs of decline, and its sibling the history of postcolonial medicine is flourishing. For Ernst, asking the question expressed a lack of identity within the field of the history of colonial medicine.įor a historian consciously to choose this question to frame a study of colonial medicine in the Middle Ages, that is the period before 1500, it may seem a little like jumping on a bandwagon that has gone off the rails.
Ten years later, Waltraud Ernst critiqued this question in another important essay, arguing that it had become a “somewhat hoary catchphrase”. In 1997 in a much-cited essay, Shula Marks asked: “what is colonial about colonial medicine?”
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