Abstract
Studies of maritime worlds have grown in prevalence in recent decades, and this volume is a welcome addition to those concerned with the Indian Ocean, especially since it uses the region to think about processes involving medicine and healing that are usually confined to nations or empires. Scholarship on the Indian Ocean will probably never rival the outpouring of literature on the Atlantic or Mediterranean, although given the number of peoples who live nearby, it may long continue to be greater than that for the Pacific, Baltic, and the rest. As the editors say in their introduction, the historiography of ocean-centered studies is usually thought to be shaped by Braudel’s great work on the Mediterranean; I would add that his own work was probably shaped in turn by inter-war conversations about empire and economy that were emphasizing regimes of soft power only to be confronted with the hard power of world war and anti-colonial conflict. It is worthy of remark that Braudel was writing at a time when historical geography was coming into its own, when Charles Verlinden was thinking about the problem of ‘European expansion’ in relation to medieval slavery, and when Charles Boxer was looking at multiple maritime empires with an eye toward their conflicts. After all, a prisoner of war himself Braudel’s masterpiece includes a description of the Battle of Lepanto. Revisiting the history of politics in terms of shaping materialisms of one kind or another seemed in the air, and war and cold war were giving rise to fresh views of coherent regions, while European economic treaties were being used as the basis for political cooperation. Only much later did a new entity emerge: the first International Conference on Indian Ocean Studies seems to have been held in 1979, in Perth, Australia.
For the field of the history of medicine and health, however, these two volumes constitute the first major intervention into Indian Ocean studies. The medical history of India is the best-developed in the region, but it was pioneered by historians of empire, Foucaultians concerned about knowledge and power, or students of subaltern studies who have ‘provincialized Europe’. Politics and culture have come first. Elsewhere, too, the view from imperial capitals and their archives, or from local polities, has been at the forefront.
But perhaps in an era of nuclear submarines and environmental studies it is possible to think of huge spaces like the Indian Ocean without thinking first of their shoreline ports. The predictable monsoons allowed the ocean to support long-distance maritime trade since ancient times, connecting the peoples of its littoral at least a bit until the shifting of much of the silk road to sea-borne vessels in the period Europeans call the Middle Ages, and with a rush of militarized main routes from the sixteenth century. Does that make fresh approaches to the history of medicine possible?
Winterbottom and Tesfaye have certainly assembled a rich mélange of excellent papers. All the authors deal with people and places near the Indian Ocean, with the possible exception of Mahmud Angrini’s study of al-Razi’s work on Arthrology and George Michael La Rue’s important paper on the 1834–1835 plague epidemic in Egypt and its connections with the slave trade (which was mainly with places in continental Africa). The editors have also been inclusive in their choice of authors: not only historians but archaeologists and anthropologists contribute to the collection, and the thoughtful analyses of the mainly non-written sources of the latter causes one to think carefully about what we historians might have been missing. For instance, Amanda Respess and Lisa Niziolek point to what can be learned about gendered medicine by examining artefacts collected from a large ship that was trading between China and India and wrecked north of Java in the thirteenth century; Julie Laplante, writing about contemporary ‘indigenous medicine’ in South Africa, invokes not only the biomedical and financial prerequisites for preclinical trials but Rastafarians and even the naturalizing phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (only six years younger than Braudel); Jonathan Walz walks along with those practicing Zigua medicine in north-east Tanzania, noticing how they feel and understand links between ocean and mountain, past and future.
But the historians have important things to say, too. By examining practices to increase fertility along the Malabar Coast from the beginning of sustained European contact to about 1800, P. K. Yasser Arafath shows how complex and interactive were the multiple cultural traditions of that place. S. Jeyaseela Stephen and Minakshi Menon, in each of their perceptive papers, study the movement of various kinds of medical knowledge between India and Europe, Menon drawing special attention to the economic frameworks. The networks of empire also figure in other papers, whether British (as in Anouska Bhattacharyya’s account of lunacy in nineteenth-century India and Shirish N. Kavadi’s study of the Rockefeller Foundation’s efforts there a few decades later) or Portuguese (as in Cristiana Bastos and Ana Cristina Roque’s wonderful comparison of two differently educated medical practitioners on the coast of modern Mozambique). Many other countries and empires are absent, but Rashed Chowdhury’s surprising yet fascinating study of Russian medical intervention in Ethiopia just before the First World War sheds light on the Red Cross, military diplomacy, and continued links between the two countries into the current era. Island sugar-plantations figure, too: Youshina Hurgobin investigates the medical ideologies affecting indentured labor on Mauritius, while Karine Aasgaard Jansen studies disease and French empire on Réunion.
Is there a take-home message? All the excellent work presented here focuses on places that can be found at the shores of Indian Ocean or nearby; they also deal with health and healing or the frameworks that affected them. If one wanted to study ‘medical’ links between places, one might look into the movements of diseases, objects and specimens, texts, people, cultures and ideologies, or ideas and practices. All those topics are represented in the papers, but eclectically rather than as an analytical backbone. Or if one wanted to find out what is special about the Indian Ocean World (signified through the volume as ‘IOW’), one might think of weather or water, seasonality, fishes and reefs, or foods and medicines. These, too, pop up in many of the accounts, but not as often, making the IOW itself of minor importance. The nations and empires framework to which we have been accustomed continues to dominate. In other words, the authors are seldom intent on thinking about whether the region or environment had implications for anything particular about the problems and opportunities of health or disease, or to knowledge about them. For the moment, then, these two volumes suggest that the study of medicine and healing ‘in’ the IOW prevails. But that makes the title of the volumes correct. I, for one, hope that efforts to study the subject will continue to be explored, for only that might lead to views about how medicine ‘from’ the IOW had distinctiveness. Of course, it is possible that it had none, leaving the framework of IOW empty. But for now it works as a geographical catch-all for a wide-ranging subject, and by juxtaposing the work of diverse scholars in several fields of study the editors have created a very a stimulating conversation. Following how it develops will be well worthwhile.