Health and Disease in the Tropical Zone: Nineteenth-century British and Dutch Accounts of European Mortality in the Tropics

Abstract

Acclimatisation theories varied depending on the political and social contexts in which they were used. Historians of medicine have argued that the pessimism of physicians practising in British India about the acclimatisation of white settlers in the tropics increased around the turn of the eighteenth century. Both British and Dutch physicians had long commented on the proverbial unhealthfulness of Batavia, but rather than relating this to the tropical climate, they emphasised the unwholesome behaviour of Dutch inhabitants. When Dutch physicians debated the possibility of white settlement in the tropical East Indies in the 1840s, many emphasised the importance of virtuous predisposition and intelligent behaviour in adjusting to the colony’s climate, suggesting optimistically that environmental problems might be resisted.

After the era of European exploration and imperialism commenced in the sixteenth century, explorers, merchants, military officers, colonial administrators and physicians were baffled by the high mortality rates of white sailors and other individuals who resided, even for limited periods of time, in newly discovered and conquered lands. In particular, the tropical zone, where Europeans were exposed to much warmer temperatures than they had been accustomed to, soon acquired a reputation of being unusually unhealthy. At this time, physicians expressed various opinions about the possibility of white settlement in the tropics; as Warwick Anderson has argued, ‘medicine was as much a discourse of settlement as it was a means of knowing and mastering disease’ (Anderson, 2006b, p. 4). A variety of medical prescriptions, based on current insights into the importance of prudent, moderate, virtuous behaviour, suggested ways in which colonists could become acclimatised to their new environments.¹ They adopted a variety of interpretive stances derived from contemporary medical wisdom, emphasising at times individual behaviour and constitutional strength, and at others the dangers of miasmas, high temperatures, geographical features and climactic factors. This varied interpretive repertoire could be deployed to explain radically different health outcomes, formulate medical regimens to assist the recovery of patients, advocate various public health interventions and justify diverse colonial policies. To illustrate the flexibility of medical discourse on acclimatisation and the possibility and conditions of white settlement in the tropics, this article analyses British and Dutch accounts of the unhealthfulness of Batavia, which had become proverbial by the middle of the eighteenth century.

Constitution, Disease, Environment and Climate

During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, European and North American physicians viewed health as the outcome of an individual’s ability to maintain an inner equilibrium as well as a balance between the individual and his/her immediate environment. Living a moral life, framed as a life of moderation, in combination with avoiding exposure to moisture, mist, vapours, precipitation and abrupt environmental changes such as sudden drops in temperature were all considered essential. Those who could afford it consulted their physicians whenever the season changed, convinced that their health would benefit from medical assistance in making the required adjustments (Rosenberg, 1979). Physicians and the public believed that epidemics and other outbreaks of disease that affected communities as a whole were the outcome of miasmas, which were caused by the fermentation of rotting vegetable and animal matter and the accompanying noxious effluvia. Epidemics could be prevented by allowing the unrestricted circulation of fresh air and fresh water and by general hygiene and cleanliness. Charles Rosenberg refers to this type of explanation as the configurational view, in contrast to the contagionist view, which holds a specific contaminating agent responsible (Rosenberg, 1992). In both views, individual predisposition, viewed as a combination of the strength of a person’s constitution and his or her moral character, mediates the influence of various environmental factors, explaining why some individuals get sick and others do not. Those individuals who live exemplary lives characterised by virtue and temperance might expect to be able to withstand disease. By the same token, those who indulged in depravity and vice were likely to be among the first victims when it struck. In this way, both medical and moral views played significant roles in explaining health and disease.

From the turn of the nineteenth century, European and North American physicians became increasingly concerned about the effect of the climactic conditions in the tropical zone on the health of European settlers. Average temperatures were much higher, moisture and humidity continuously present, and tropical vegetation more abundant, so that plant and animal matter accumulated more easily and rotted more quickly, exuding larger quantities noxious and disease-causing fumes. Europeans arriving in the tropics had to acclimatise to a radically different climate, and this process could upend the precarious internal balance required for optimal health. Physicians increasingly believed that racial groups belonged in specific climate zones; because Europeans belonged in the moderate zone, they could not expect to thrive in the tropics. In a widely read book, which represented the first attempt to synthesise medical insights into the diseases common in the Torrid Zone, English physician James Lind (1771) recommended that Europeans settling in the tropics observe the practices of indigenous populations. They should adopt indigenous habits relating to food, clothing and behaviour. By acting prudently and avoiding excessive exposure to sunshine, physical labour and consumption of food and alcohol, settlers could expect to become seasoned to the tropical climate within two years. It was, of course, common sense to avoid locations known for insalubrity, such as, swamps, and areas known for damp atmosphere, haze, mist or excess moisture. Lind recommended locations where fresh sea breezes were frequent. Despite his general optimism about settlement in the tropics, Lind spent several pages on Batavia and its unusually high mortality rates. ‘The unwholesome air of that place alone’, he wrote, ‘has cut off more Europeans than have fallen by the sword in all the bloody wars carried on by the Dutch in that part of the world’. He suggested that the British fleet, intent on occupying Batavia a few years prior, had lost more men ‘by the malignant and fatal diseases of that climate’ than it ever had in India (Lind, 1771, p. 97) (see Figure 1: Batavia as seen from the Ocean) Diseases in the tropical zone could be unusually severe, but Lind argued that by following a straightforward medical regimen Europeans could maintain their health.

Half a century later, James Johnson’s influential treatise The Influence of Tropical Climates on European Constitutions (1821) gave a decidedly more pessimistic account. Each racial group belonged, by nature, in a specific climactic zone, argued Johnson, and leaving it affected health irrevocably, leading to disease and, often, premature death. Even if Europeans did survive, the tropical climate would inflict degeneration over the course of several generations. Johnson acknowledged that prudent behaviour would assist individuals in maintaining their health— moderation, abstaining from alcohol and a light diet were all important. He retained strong doubts, however, about the viability of permanent white settlement in the tropics. Mark Harrison (1999) argues that the change in medical opinion about the viability of white settlement in the tropics coincided with a change in emphasis in British colonial efforts, as commerce was increasingly supplanted by territorial expansion and the exploitation of primary resources. This required more extensive European settlement in the tropics over a longer duration. Johnson devoted 23 of 416 pages to explaining how the British attempt to capture Batavia in 1800 was foiled by the sickness and mortality of the crew on the war ships anchored near two small islands in front of its harbour. Not even once did he refer to the climate; the catastrophes were, instead, produced by a few miasmas (rotting vegetable matter in local swamps) on one of the islands. The cause of the high mortality among the British was therefore extremely local in nature.

Figure 1

Source: Bartele Gallery.

The copious literature on acclimatisation relates the health, well-being and afflictions of Europeans living in the tropics to a combination of factors. These include enduring factors such as the climate, local weather patterns, excessive moisture during the rainy season or geographical features such as obstacles to the free circulation of fresh air or to the draining of reservoirs of stagnant water. Proximity to swamps or miasmas causing noxious fumes or, alternatively, the presence of refreshing sea breezes and fresh, free-flowing water were also important. Individual behaviour also factored: diet, exercise, the consumption of alcoholic and other stimulating beverages, exposure to sunshine and moral calibre all mattered. These medical ideas do not provide a coherent set of explanations; instead, they constitute a flexible interpretive repertoire that could be employed depending on the specific demands of the circumstances. Less obvious in general medical treatises, the variability in medical accounts of acclimatisation becomes more apparent when analysing the ways physicians explained the condition of their patients or the outbreak of diseases in specific locations. Analysing these accounts highlights the variability, or flexibility, in medical theories on health, disease, migration and acclimatisation.

Batavia, the Europeans’ Graveyard

Partly because of the British dislike of the Dutch, based on their centuries-long rivalry over the control of colonial lands and shipping routes, and partly because of the proverbial unhealthfulness of Batavia, British physicians often described it as the most dangerous city in the tropical zone. It was often referred to as the Europeans’ graveyard because of its unusually high mortality rates. After Napoleon’s forces conquered the Netherlands, the British government made plans to take over the Dutch East Indies they did so in 1811. Just before the conquest of Java, rogue London-based publisher John Stockdale, sensing an opportunity to make a quick profit, wrote and published the first popular English book about Java, the most populous island of the East Indies (Stockdale, 2003[1811]). It was not based on first-hand observations but on a perusal and translation of various non-English works, focusing on sensational elements such as rumours about the mysterious and extremely lethal poison tree (Bastin, 2003). Stockdale’s book repeated well-worn clichés which had been bandied about by the British for generations. It elaborated upon Batavia’s filthy canals, its architecture precluding the circulation of fresh air, its gluttonous and often drunk Dutch inhabitants, the proximity of several foul-smelling swamps and, at times, overwhelming stench from noxious and disease-causing vapours. Stockdale wrote that Batavia was ‘one of the most unwholesome spots upon the face of the globe’ and, glibly, that it was ‘not strange that the inhabitants of such a country should be familiar with disease and death’. A traveller, complimented as intelligent, was quoted by Stockland as describing European settlers in Batavia as ‘wan, weak, and languid; as if labouring with the “disease of death”’ (Stockdale, 2003 [1811], pp. 129–130). Exacerbated by uninformed town management, the ‘destructive unhealthiness of the climate is carried to the very pinnacle of corruption’ (p. 133). Similar views appeared in The Conquest of Java, written by a soldier who had participated in the British military campaign (Thorn, 2004 [1815]). Both accounts reiterated British medical views on the deleterious nature of the tropical climate, but added that the comportment of the Dutch and the ill-informed way that they had husbanded their trading capital had transformed it into a city that Europeans entered at their own peril and with little chance of surviving more than a few years.

British army surgeon Robert Tytler, who was part of the 5th Battalion of Bengal Volunteers when it occupied Java, settled just outside Batavia’s city walls, which gave him the opportunity to observe conditions there without endangering his own health. (see Figure 2. The city of Batavia) In 1815, he published in the Java Government Gazette a series of five long letters which laid out the damning conclusions at which he had arrived. Under the pen-name ‘Benevolus’, Tytler wrote of Batavia as the ‘triumphant abode of mortality and disease’ and the ‘yawning grave of all who may unhappily be doomed to visit it’.² (Benevolus, 1815a, pp. 2–3) Side-stepping common medical opinion on the adverse effect of the tropical climate on Europeans—based on observations in India—Tytler began his first article: ‘The mortality, for which this country has been so long dreaded … does not exist in the climate, nor is it naturally inherent to the situation and character of the Island’ (p. 2). On the contrary, ‘no country is in reality more healthy than Java, if the climate be allowed fair play’ (Benevolus, 1815b, p. 3). For rhetorical purposes, Tytler ruled out climactic factors from the outset, which allowed him to elaborate on the shortcomings of Batavia’s inhabitants instead.

Figure 2

Source: Bartele Gallery.

Tytler enumerated the deficiencies which defeated the delightfully salubrious climate, including misguided personal choices, lack of hygiene, intemperance and a widespread lack of moderation. Batavians kept their windows and doors shut for most of the day, so that fresh air could not enter and bad air and noxious fumes accumulated. ‘Health had been fated by the Colonists to be looked upon as a formidable enemy’, thundered Tytler, ‘whose encroachment it is necessary to guard against’ (Benevolus, 1815a, p. 2). Houses were placed close together with many trees planted around them, restricting the circulation of air. Batavia’s canals, which were probably dug because of an unfortunate nostalgia for Dutch villages, continuously accumulated rotting matter which was not promptly removed either by flowing fresh water or by human intervention. It was not uncommon to see the decaying corpses of dead horses and other animals floating in the water, producing an unbearable stench. Tytler found putrid water, noxious effluvia and putrescent vegetable and animal matter everywhere. Batavians, he concluded, had poisoned their own city, and its unhealthfulness could be fully accounted for by their poor decisions. Batavia’s Dutch inhabitants’ behaviour, Tytler pressed on, predisposed them to disease. They ate large amounts of hearty food, consumed alcohol excessively and spent most time indoors, depriving themselves of the benefits of fresh air. He repeatedly criticised the copious consumption of alcohol—‘will you not take something to drink?’ every visitor was asked, whether his call was ‘at morning, noon or night’ (Benevolus, 1815d, p. 4).

Tytler ended his fourth letter in a crescendo which reached a powerful finale. Batavia’s inhabitants did everything in their power to weaken their health, which made them vulnerable to the disease-causing conditions they continuously generated in their immediate environment:

The pale, sallow, bilious coloured complexion, visible in the bloated countenances, seen in the streets of Batavia, the tremulous hand, unpleasant breath, the weak, blood stained, and watery eye, evidently indicate whence the evil arises, and point to a body, whose stamina are already undermined, and which only waits the application of febrile poison, or exposure to the direct rays of the sun, to find to fall an unresisting sacrifice to the fatal influence of the disease, without hope affording a momentary glimpse, that medicine will eventually prove the least avail. (Benevolus, 1815d, p. 4)

Tytler’s conclusions were unambiguous. The Dutch living in Batavia, ‘while blessed with a climate most conducive to health, which, by exerting every baneful circumstance within the power of humanity, they successfully frustrate, seeming only anxious to excite and foster disease, where nature intends health and comfort’ (Benevolus, 1815d, p. 4). One of the main purposes of his writing was to illustrate the superiority of the British in medical and hygienic matters. His letters could therefore be interpreted as a medical justification for the British takeover of Java. Batavia’s health had improved after the British arrived, he suggested, partly because they had filled some of the canals and had cut down most trees. For Tytler, such preventive measures were far more effective than any possible medical intervention after someone had contracted the Batavia fever (Benevolus, 1815c, 1815e). The purity and free circulation of fresh air and the continuous ventilation of houses were the keys to health. He failed to mention that similar recommendations had been made repeatedly during the past sixty years, but, as Schoute (1937, p. 71) has wryly observed, most of them were only ever carried out on paper. Tytler also failed to mention the unhealthfulness of Bengal, where he resided, which rivalled that of Batavia.

In 1816, after Napoleon’s defeat, the archipelago was returned to Dutch control. In his monumental History of Java, Thomas Stamford Raffles, the archipelago’s Lieutenant Governor during the brief British period, emphasised Java’s salubrious climate but noted that its benefits were not noticeable in Batavia (Raffles, 1817–1826). Soon after Tytler’s return to Jessore in Bengal, the first global cholera epidemic broke out, solidifying Bengal’s dismal reputation for health. For the rest of his life, Tytler focused on collecting evidence for his theory that this dramatic disease was caused by the consumption of unripe or spoiled rice (Tytler, 1817, 1833a, 1833b). Instead of focusing on the climate, the beneficial effects of ventilation and the free circulation of fresh air, he now focused on a specific causative agent, the consumption of which invariably led to the contraction of cholera. Instead of emphasising a specific configuration of factors that, in combination, caused high levels of disease, Tytler embraced a most unlikely toxicological view on the causation of cholera.

Again, Tytler found himself at odds with most of his British colleagues. In his explanations of Batavia’s unhealthfulness, Tytler had excluded the climate from consideration and focused instead on the deplorable and disease-inducing behaviour of its Dutch inhabitants. To explain the outbreak of cholera in Bengal, most British physicians emphasised the climate. In combination with their anti-contagionist views, they were able to explain it as a strictly local epidemic (Chakrabarti, 2010; Harrison, 1996a). Tytler, on the contrary, followed an infective perspective which explained the worldwide spread of this devastating epidemic as the consequence of the recent removal of restrictions on the exportation of rice from India, which saw unscrupulous Indian traders flooding the European market with inferior and spoiled rice. This explanation, like his explanation of the poor health of Batavia, focused on ignorance and the consequences of ill-informed behaviour, since it was based upon natives consuming, out of ignorance, spoiled or unripe rice. It was no surprise that the better-educated British settlers in the area were not affected by cholera. Tytler appears to blame the ignorance of local natives for the outbreak of cholera in Bengal and its worldwide spread by unscrupulous rice traders who were eager to sell poor quality rice all over the world.

Dutch Medical Theories on Health and Acclimatisation

Dutch physicians and officials of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) had long worried about the unhealthy state of Batavia, its main harbour in the Dutch East Indies (Schoute, 1937). Apart from numerous reports written by physicians in the VOC’s employ, most of which remained unpublished, the works of Lind (1781) and Johnson (1824–1826) were translated from the English and made their mark. The first Dutch treatise on acclimatisation and its limits was Willem Bosch’s De Dysenteria Tropica (On Tropical Dysentery), published in 1844. It struck a decidedly pessimistic tone. Bosch gave away the conclusion in the subtitle: ‘A cursory investigation of the question whether human beings have the physical capacity to leave their homeland and inhabit other climates, refuted by a calculation of mortality in the East Indies’. Bosch explained the depressing statistics of European mortality in the Indies by proposing a new medical theory for tropical dysentery, an unusually severe disease that could only be cured by repatriation. In addition, Bosch (1844, p. xiii) claimed that most common diseases observed in the colonies had ‘the same common cause (the climate)’. He explained this by arguing that the various human races naturally belonged to specific geographical zones with their corresponding climates: In these areas, ‘everything unites in order to maintain its characteristic physiological state, which is exclusively appropriate for that race and for each climate’ (Bosch, 1844, p. 2). White Europeans therefore moved to the Torrid Zone at their own peril. After arriving in the Indies, Bosch noted, European soldiers could expect to live, on average, four-and-a-half years; civilians had a life expectancy of around eleven years. European migrants would, Bosch calculated with mathematical precision, ‘sacrifice, of his life expectancy, if he is employed by the military, five-sixths, and, if he is a civilian, three-fifths’. (Bosch, 1844, p. 28)

Bosch’s conclusions were more pessimistic than those of his British colleagues. He marshalled medical, physiological, climactic and statistical arguments to forcefully argue the futility of establishing white settlements in the tropics. A number of statements in the preface to De Dysenteria Tropica offer insight into the possible motivations driving the book. Bosch lamented that Dutch physicians in the East Indies worked long hours under trying circumstances for exceedingly low pay. Bosch’s discussion of the perils of European settlement in the tropics suggested that it was incumbent upon the Dutch state to reward its employees more liberally. The colonies generated enormous profits for the Dutch Treasury while Dutch colonists earned a pittance during their short colonial lives. Bosch had a pronounced moral seriousness and found this deeply unjust.

But Bosch was one of the very few physicians working in the Dutch East Indies who argued that white settlement in the Dutch colonies was not feasible. F. A. C. Waitz, a querulous and carping German physician with a long-standing interest in unorthodox medicine, struck a more positive note as he wrote extensively about the ways in which Europeans could preserve their health in the tropics. Most needed time to get accustomed to living in the new environment, Waitz conceded, but there was nothing concerning about this. Newcomers to the Indies should, he suggested, observe the indigenous population, whose habits showed the best means of adapting to the tropical climate. Light, cotton clothing was best, together with regular bathing, a light diet and abstaining from alcohol (Waitz, 1829c). The Dutch inhabitants in the Indies instead tended, grievously, to distinguish themselves from the indigenous population, going about in black overcoats and other heavy, constricting items of clothing. In contrast, Waitz regularly scandalised the European community by wearing a sarong in public. But if Europeans could look past the dictates of decorum and follow his model, adopting indigenous customs, they could expect to become acclimatised within a year or two; ‘after that, they appear to be at home’ (Waitz, 1829c, p. 35).

Several factors could interfere with successful acclimatisation to the tropics. Waitz particularly mourned the mistaken ministrations of physicians, including the increased use of calomel (a mercury compound), which had become much more fashionable after the British interregnum. He blamed Johnson’s translated manual, which was considered an oracle for Europeans living in the Indies, as the main source for this ‘mercury mania’ (Waitz, 1829a). He also thought that bloodletting, similarly recommended by Johnson, was inappropriate and even dangerous. Waitz instead advocated the consumption of the herbs and spices used by the indigenous population against the most common diseases, especially those used for dysentery and other intestinal ailments (Waitz, 1829b). Several of his colleagues had observed that the Indo-European women prescribing herbal concoctions were far more popular than orthodox physicians (see Pols, 2009). By following the lifestyle of the Javanese and through the judicious consumption of indigenous medications for common tropical ailments, Waitz believed that most Europeans could acclimatise, particularly if they avoided indulgence in alcohol and food. Thus, Waitz (1846) disagreed with the pessimistic ideas of Bosch.

Because physicians related outbreaks of epidemics, as well as diseases prevalent in specific locations, to local factors, they often examined their immediate environments to identify specific sources of disease. Physicians discussed the characteristics of the Batavia fever, the Bengal fever, colonial fever and other diseases by relating them to the unique constellation of local factors that had given rise to them. Some physicians attempted to survey their nearby environments in a sort of medical geography. They worked to survey the climate, prevailing winds, periods of rainfall and drought and geographic features such as the course of rivers, hills and other characteristics that furthered or impeded refreshing breezes and the presence of swamps (Rupke, 2000). Physician Pieter Bleeker (1843), for example, provided detailed information about these factors for Batavia and also surveyed the population, neighbourhoods and dwelling types. Like many of his colleagues, he recommended that Batavians leave the old coastal city and move into the new town of Weltevreden (San Souci or Well-content), located in the hills a few miles away.

The German physician, botanist, geographer, cartographer and volcanologist Franz Junghuhn (1842), held that Java’s mountainous areas were pleasant and cool and, in fact, conducive to European health. The numerous cool springs and wells provided many locations where Europeans could bathe, recuperate and be refreshed. Junghuhn acknowledged that conditions at Java’s northern coast were far from desirable, but, echoing Lind’s optimism, suggested that a healthy location could be discovered nearby every unhealthy one in the tropical zone. If Europeans could never fully acclimatise to the tropical climate, they could at least maintain good health if they spent sufficient time in the hills or moved there permanently. Junghuhn, for his part, retired to Lembang, a small spa town on the slopes of the Tangkuban Prahu volcano north of Bandung.

Cornelis Swaving was one of the few academically trained physicians in the Dutch East Indies and an unusually prodigious author. He had very different opinions about acclimatisation. From his own experience, he knew that he had been healthier and happier in Batavia than ever before. He once quipped that Batavia’s mortality statistics only demonstrated that people did, in fact, die there. Swaving saw health as the outcome numerous variables interacting; it was therefore superficial to ascribe ill health to one cause only, particularly since it was clear that the behaviour of Batavians and their living conditions contributed more to the prevalence of disease than the climate. As he argued in his somewhat ponderous style:

When we consider … the debilitating lifestyle, luxury, orgies, laziness, superstition, fanaticism, bad upbringing, despotism based on fear or slavery, the deprivation of the best nutrition, invigorating drinks such as wine, or the abuse of even more harmful substances such as opium and other substances. When a population group is influenced by a confluence of so many factors, each one of which one acting by itself would be sufficient to induce, directly or indirectly, a significant degree of weakness, how mistaken would be our judgment if we ascribe everything to only one cause, i.e., the heath. (Swaving, 1844, p. 85)

According to Swaving, health was the outcome of intelligent and virtuous living, both in personal conduct and in the management of the immediate environment. Ascribing the cause of ill-health exclusively to one factor was at best a mistake; at worse, it represented casting about for an alibi, or absolution, as one effected one’s own demise.

Swaving argued that the reputed unhealthfulness of Batavia and the Dutch East Indies in general depended on the low moral and intellectual calibre of its European inhabitants. He claimed that there were good reasons that the hamlet of Harderwijk, which housed the recruitment station of the VOC and, later, the Dutch State, was nicknamed the sewer of Europe. Europe’s poor, desperate, ill and inebriated enlisted there for colonial service because they had no other option. If the Dutch instead sent highly educated physicians, judges to educate youngsters and religious teachers to the Indies, mortality rates would decline in due course (Swaving, 1849). If Dutch colonists were to commit themselves to leading exemplary lives concentrating on the promotion of science and religion, living conditions would inevitably improve:

The climate constitutes a challenge; if Europeans maintain a steady daily rhythm of activity and cerebral labour, and only give in to venal seductions to a limited extent, they will remain standing. Overcoming the climate is an ethical and moral victory marking success in overcoming the challenges of the climate. (Swaving, 1846, p. 365)

Medical science would not only assist Dutch colonists in achieving better individual health but also guide them to build improved living quarters and towns.

Swaving was convinced that the healthiness of specific locations was the outcome of a long-lasting interaction between humans and the environments they found themselves in. Thijssen (1824) had earlier argued that the Low Countries had become much healthier after they became part of the Roman Empire because the Romans had dug canals, cut the forests down to size and built a network of roads. In civilising the country, the Romans had a beneficial effect on the climate and therefore its inhabitants as well. Likewise, if the Dutch living in the Indies were of high moral and intellectual calibre, they would live prudently and civilise the land, and this would have a civilising effect on both the indigenous population and the climate. To lead a balanced life, Swaving stated, individuals only needed to follow rational insights derived from nature itself. The capacity for reason and conducting scientific research separated prudent Europeans from the indigenous inhabitants of the archipelago. Unlike Waitz, Swaving explicitly warned against following native habits and consuming indigenous herbal prescriptions to maintain their health, as they were inevitably based on superstition.

The works of Waitz and Swaving were part of an outpouring of articles on acclimatisation published in the Dutch East Indies around 1848. Andrew Goss (2011) and other historians have characterised this unique and all-too-brief period as the Batavia Renaissance. The Batavian Association of Arts and Sciences was revived through the efforts of Protestant minister W. R. van Hoëvell. In 1838, van Hoëvel founded the Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië (Journal of the Dutch Indies), the first journal devoted to the study of the land and the population of the Dutch East Indies and the first serial publication in the colonies. In the late 1840s, journals devoted to natural science and medicine were founded as well, revealing an unusual level of scholarly activity in Batavia. The debate on acclimatisation that filled the pages of several of these journals in itself demonstrated that European brainwork was possible in tropical regions. The Batavia Renaissance coincided with a growing awareness among the Dutch inhabitants of the East Indies of their limited political rights and the lack of local educational opportunities for their children. Several physicians working in the Indies identified with their cause, which motivated them to write positive accounts of the possibility of European settlement in the tropics (Pols, 2012).

Willem Bosch, who had returned to the Indies as Director of the Colonial Medical Service, participated in a public meeting of Batavian citizens to protest their predicament. This earned him the ire of the Governor had General. Before returning to the Indies, Bosch had married into a wealthy banking family which supported the establishment of privately run Indies plantations. He became supportive of Dutch liberal initiatives and critical of the so-called cultivation system, which forced Javanese peasants to devote 20 per cent of their land to grow export crops, to be sold to the colonial administration at fixed low rates. Rather sheepishly, Bosch recanted his earlier writings on the deleterious effects of the tropical climate and claimed that recent progress in medical science obviated earlier fears about death and disease in the colonies.

The fact that man, by reason of his higher abilities, mind, science, and experience, and not because of his physique, is able to counteract the disadvantageous influence of a strange climate that is alien to him, has the ability to move far from his birthplace and reside there, appears to be confirmed to a high degree by these data [on mortality statistics from 1844 to 1853]. (Bosch, 1858, p. 171)

For Bosch, it was the failure to realise the full moral and intellectual abilities residing in human nature that explained the inability to acclimatise. When citizens exercise their mental and moral abilities fully, the effects of the climate and other factors causing bodily diseases were greatly diminished.

Conclusion

This article illustrates the flexibility and variability of the early nineteenth-century medical theories of acclimatisation and the possibility of white settlement in the tropics by analysing the views of several physicians writing about Batavia’s unhealthy nature and the state of health of its inhabitants. Robert Tytler, a British physician who lived in Batavia for several years, broke with received British medical opinion by ruling out the climate as a factor in the city’s infamous mortality rates. He placed responsibility instead with misguided town planning and the adverse living habits of Batavia’s inhabitants. After returning to Bengal, Tytler substituted toxicological explanations for this social perspective, identifying the source of cholera in the consumption of unripe and spoilt rice. Willem Bosch, who wrote the first Dutch treatise on the ill effects of the tropical climate on European constitutions, argued that white settlement in the tropics was impossible—that white bodies and tropical climates were incompatible. He changed his mind during the Batavian Renaissance, as he began fighting for local educational opportunities and promoting scientific and medical research to be conducted locally. Many European physicians working in the Dutch East Indies came to embrace similar optimistic views about the possibilities of white settlement in the colonies. In British India, on the contrary, medical views on acclimation became ever more pessimistic after the turn of the nineteenth century, as Mark Harrison (1999) and other historians of medicine have demonstrated.

Medical opinion on white settlement in the tropics, acclimatisation and how Europeans living in the tropics could maintain their health or succumbed to disease evidently depended on a variety of social and political factors, related to specific contexts and circumstances. Manuals on tropical medicine, in particular when they were authored by physicians residing in Europe, aimed to provide a general analysis of health conditions in the warmest areas in the world. They emphasised the general characteristics of the tropical zone, such as the hot climate and high levels of humidity. European physicians working in the colonies tended to ascribe more significance to local factors, and specific circumstances and events, when they wanted to explain variations in mortality rates or the outbreak of epidemics. They emphasised individual behaviour, the moral characteristics of ethnic groups and distinctive circumstances, rather than general conditions such as heat and humidity, as these were not very useful in explaining local phenomena. As my account has demonstrated, the differences between theories of acclimatisation between various colonies and empires are striking. Ever greater variability can be expected if medical accounts by European physicians addressing local health conditions in the tropics are analysed. Depending on the events they aimed to explain and the broader opinions they embraced, it can be expected that their accounts display high levels of variability. It is therefore necessary to look beyond the most prominent medical voices by analysing the accounts offered by lesser-known doctors who attempted to make sense of local conditions. This will reveal the high level of flexibility and variability in such accounts.

Footnotes

Notes

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