Jackson, Sally-Anne (Author)
University of California, Riverside
Roy, Parama
Edition Details: Advisor: Roy, Parama
Physical Details: 308 pp.
Language: English
In the late nineteenth century, the germ and cell theories and parasitology heralded the scientific discipline of biomedicine, an empirical approach to healing. Subsequently, the metaphoric connotations attached to disease, which, in the Victorian sickroom, simultaneously defined nurses and patients, gave way as the clinical gaze focused solely on the disease and placed the patient in parentheses. This study documents the disciplinary power of biomedicine and traces its influence through late nineteenth-century Victorian England to the colonial arena of late imperial expansion, southern Africa. Biomedicine, re-imagined in the tropics as tropical medicine, enabled the colonial authorities to medicalize native bodies, to discipline them, and to rationalize the drawing of racial boundaries. At the end of the nineteenth century, the metaphorical interpretations of disease transformed, legacy of evolution and Social Darwinism, and the ideological shift fed the perception that disease and degeneration were intimately related, a move that cast the diseased body as other, alien. Such a perception was influential in Africa since the African body was already constructed as diseased and degenerate. When colonial doctors arrived in Africa, fueled by the desire to save the natives of the Dark Continent from disease and suffering, they were surprised to find efficient indigenous healing systems in operation. Perceiving these systems as antitheses to science, and perhaps threatening to their own biomedical systems, the doctors denigrated and suppressed them. Employment of the degenerative theory is obvious in the colonial management of two important diseases in southern Africa: malaria, endemic to Africa, and tuberculosis, introduced by Europeans. Colonial doctors declared war on malaria, but when failure seemed imminent, they turned to a more achievable form of victory and medicalized African bodies as vectors of infection. Tuberculosis, in contrast, colonized thousands of African bodies, which allowed doctors not only to medicalize black bodies and construct them as different to white bodies but also to exploit them in the name of capitalism, specifically gold mining.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 64 (2004): 3671. UMI order no. 3109651.
Similar Citations
Book
Anna Greenwood;
(2015)
Beyond the state: The colonial medical service in British Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB389644608/)
Thesis
Rankin, John;
(2010)
Healing the “African Body” in the Age of Abolition? British Medicine in West Africa, Circa 1800--1860
(/isis/citation/CBB001562764/)
Article
Aderinto, Saheed;
(2012)
Dangerous Aphrodisiac, Restless Sexuality: Venereal Disease, Biomedicine, and Protectionism in Colonial Lagos, Nigeria
(/isis/citation/CBB001200590/)
Book
Chakrabarti, Pratik;
(2014)
Medicine and Empire: 1600--1960
(/isis/citation/CBB001551020/)
Thesis
Masebo, Oswald;
(2010)
Society, State, and Infant Welfare: Negotiating Medical Interventions in Colonial Tanzania, 1920--1950
(/isis/citation/CBB001562772/)
Book
Crozier, Anna;
(2007)
Practising Colonial Medicine: The Colonial Medical Service in British East Africa
(/isis/citation/CBB000830503/)
Book
Adrian S. Wisnicki;
(2019)
Fieldwork of Empire, 1840-1900: Intercultural Dynamics in the Production of British Expeditionary Literature
(/isis/citation/CBB998942839/)
Article
Kenworthy, Joan M.;
(2013)
Albert Walter, O.B.E. (1877--1972): Meteorologist in the Colonial Service. Part I: His Early Life and Work in Mauritius
(/isis/citation/CBB001321073/)
Thesis
Osseo-Asare, Abena Dove Agyepoma;
(2005)
Bitter Roots: African Science and the Search for Healing Plants in Ghana,1885--2005
(/isis/citation/CBB001561890/)
Book
Tilley, Helen;
(2011)
Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge, 1870--1950
(/isis/citation/CBB001250424/)
Article
Julia M Wells;
(2020)
Quinine, Whisky, and Epsom Salts: Amateur Medical Treatment in the White Settler Communities of British East and South-Central Africa, 1890–1939
(/isis/citation/CBB204814791/)
Article
Julia Wells;
(2018)
"I Was Doctor": White Settler Women's Amateur Medical Practice in East and South-Central African Communities, 1890–1939
(/isis/citation/CBB591035348/)
Article
Barros, Juanita De;
(2007)
Dispensers, Obeah and Quackery: Medical Rivalries in Post-Slavery British Guiana
(/isis/citation/CBB000772501/)
Book
Hunt, Nancy Rose;
(2000)
A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo
(/isis/citation/CBB000111784/)
Article
Gautam Chandra;
(2022)
Medical profession and unemployment in colonial Madras (1835–1930)
(/isis/citation/CBB106867993/)
Article
Projit Bihari Mukharji;
(2022)
Casting Blood Circulations: Translatability and Braiding Sciences in Colonial Bengal
(/isis/citation/CBB815916646/)
Book
Bala, Poonam;
(2009)
Biomedicine as a Contested Site: Some Revelations in Imperial Contexts
(/isis/citation/CBB000950294/)
Book
Ebrahimnejad, Hormoz;
(2009)
The Development of Modern Medicine in Non-Western Countries: Historical Perspectives
(/isis/citation/CBB000933048/)
Article
Putnam, Constance;
(2002)
Fascinated by Fevers: Nathan Smith (1762--1829), Early American Doctor
(/isis/citation/CBB000300519/)
Book
Pande, Ishita;
(2010)
Medicine, Race and Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire
(/isis/citation/CBB001211510/)
Be the first to comment!