Abstract
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Pratik Chakrabarti’s goal in this well-researched book is to materialise the history of medicine in the eighteenth century by exploring the links between resource and knowledge within the context of European trade and commerce, and colonialism. South Asian and the West Indian colonies of the British Empire were the sites where this material culture of imperialism—expansion, appropriation, hegemony and emaciation—was characteristically evident and are the zones that become the focus of this study. Chakrabarti’s book tells this history through an analytic that particularly emphasises the links between colonial materials, the patterns of trade and commerce in the eighteenth century and European colonialism. Chakrabarti asserts that ‘the eighteenth century, through trade, colonialism, plantation, and war, unraveled a distinct material culture and it is necessary to see the history of science and medicine in that context’ (p. 6).
The author specifically sets out to gauge if colonial ‘materials’ that imperialists encountered during their exploits in the colonies made any impact on eighteenth century modern medicine. These materials varied from minerals found in the spring waters of Jamaica to plants and materia medica to the spices and drugs in the bazaars on the Indian subcontinent. What was the nature of this encounter of Europeans with such materials? Who were the agents in this encounter? What were the important institutions facilitating this engagement? These are the questions the author tries to answer through a close study of the colonial archives.
The author points out that by and large histories of medicine that have concerned themselves with exploring the imperial angle ‘…have remained on the coastlines of the empire’ (p. 5). The author’s task in that context lies in firstly turning attention to how non-Westerners cared for their sick in order to highlight the widely dispersed and global expanse of medicinal knowledge and secondly, in clarifying the role of colonialism as a gatekeeping mechanism that screened out the relevance of such knowledge(s) in the distinctively ‘European’ modern medicine and in the dominant if partial narratives of the latter’s development. Historians of medicine have explored ways to find the third space outside the dominant cores of metropolitan and the national. Some have gone over to the side of the subaltern in their effort to study the context of science in the colony. Others have looked at global networks as the location of powerful influences. The act of de-centering in Chakrabarti’s book lies in re-visiting the ‘local’ within the ‘imperial’.
The nature of interactions in the colonial locality was different in specific spaces and instances for sure. So were the outcomes. British surgeons scouted the bazaar medicines in Bengal and Madras out of necessity as the burgeoning requirement of drugs for treating native sick troops outgrew the supply of medical consignments from Britain. Curiosity also brought them closer to materials ranging from pills and plants to texts and spices. But any genuine syncretism to the fullest scale did not materialise out of this experience in the colony. Oriental drugs rather became part of European knowledge of ‘native traditions’ even though they were investigated later as novelties and scientific specimens in the metropolis (p. 42). The author implies that the ‘synthesis’ came in the metropolis.
The imperatives of colonialism necessitated the establishment of modern naval hospitals in Kingston even before the mid-eighteenth century point. This would appear early especially if one were to consider that comparable naval hospitals were first established in North America (in New Orleans) only in 1811 (p. 65). But compared to other metropolitan naval hospitals the one in Kingston, christened ‘New Greenwich’, was a poor minion. New Greenwich was no Haslar or Plymouth. It was closely tied to colonial needs; to cure the wounded, but also to check desertions and drunkenness. The history of naval medicine at New Greenwich illustrated the strikingly different path taken by colonial disease and medicine. In a situation where the naval hospital was set up on considerations of morals and colonial discipline, and ‘medical questions were ignored’, it became beset with diseases that it was supposed to fight back. The surgeons at New Greenwich themselves perished with a mystery fever. The author thus asserts that ‘the grand plans of imperial medicine failed to address the problems of health and well-being in Jamaica’ (p. 72). As so well shown in this particular case, the complexity of local contingencies left their mark on imperial projects. The local was real and tangible and messy, and impinged on the evolving nature of medical practices planned out in metropolitan cores.
The history of medicine and medical practices in Europe’s colonies are inherently unexplainable by the tropes of modernisation, as asserted by the author. The alignment of history of medicine with domination and disciplining in Europe’s colonies created a condition of ‘duality’. The book makes an effort at capturing elements of that duality. Just like naval hospitals in Jamaica or the medical establishment in Madras that were more than anything symbols of colonial power and existed for their perpetuation, most efforts by the British botanist surgeons remained aloof from local social currents. If anything, a parallel system of care that arose often on the backs of missionaries and charitable institutions proved more relevant to local efforts in managing public health. The duality or mutual contradiction of colonial power and well-being of locals was marked in the structure of Indian Medical Service (p. 105). The same was also a feature of the process through which botanists, surgeons and missionaries sent Indian plants and medicinal products to Britain where they became part of ‘new scientific identities’ (p. 125). Much more forcefully, Chakrabarti cites the case of the planter, Edward Long in Jamaica and his dreams of starting an indigenously inflected tradition of modern medicine. But two parallel systems of the European’s search for a self-serving system of health and salvation in the colony on the one hand and appropriation, rebellion and violence on the other hand, continued to mark the history of colonialism and colonial medicine in the West Indies. ‘…This duality shaped the historical process of materials becoming medicine in Jamaica’ (p. 165).
Summed up, the author seems to be telling readers that colonialism bred ‘marginality’ for native resources as the latter came to occupy a lesser material and symbolic place in modern medicine; or birthed narratives of use of colonial materials and associated knowledge in a way that undermined their real value. Sometimes colonialism ensured that the ultimate potential of local knowledge was never tapped into or, even worse, that colonial conditions emaciated the local pool of substances and practice and knowledge. Thus the book in the end becomes a scathing critic of imperial and colonial practices undermining the value of non-Western knowledge.
The author, Pratik Chakrabarti, backs his assertions by consultation of rich and wide ranging archival sources. Covering details painstakingly, the author offers a complex view of the history of medicine unfolding amidst the tentacles of power in the two British colonies. The author emphasises the myriad forms of colonial appropriations and exclusions in the construction of the knowledge of modern medicine. Chakrabarti in this way highlights, once again, the importance of ‘local’ in the imperial.