Colonialism and International Medicine
![The Medical Missionary, oston: American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, [18--?]. From the holdings of Center for the History of Medicine/Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine—Harvard Medical School](images/colonialism.jpg)
The Medical Missionary. From the holdings of Center for the History of Medicine/ Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine—Harvard Medical School.
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Records of exploration, conquest, and trade by land and sea go back at least 4,000 years. Initially, these activities occurred over short distances, but when seafaring European nations began their long-distance voyages to colonize new parts of the world and open up trade routes, contagion spread among peoples with no immunity to diseases carried by the newcomers, and the newcomers were susceptible to diseases local to their destinations.
Spanish conquistadors carried smallpox to present-day Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru early in the 16th century. Infection spread among not only the young and the elderly but also among healthy individuals in the prime of life. Measles, typhus, mumps, and other contagious diseases brought by the Europeans took their toll and devastated civilizations in the New World. North America, the Pacific Islands, Australia, and New Zealand suffered similar population declines following European colonization in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Colonialism, Climate, and Disease
In the age of European exploration and discovery by land and sea, climate, topography, and ecology all contributed to specific chronic and infectious diseases among explorers and missionaries. Ships carried contagion to unexplored lands and continents, and surgeons used nitrous vapor in the late 1700s to fumigate ships against the spread of communicable diseases. The massive number of slaves brought to the West Indies by European colonists caused outbreaks of yellow fever, and shipborne yellow fever outbreaks occurred on the North American mainland, in Havana (Cuba), and in Panama.
European immigrants who explored the American West in the mid-18th century discovered that exposure to fresh air in the Rocky Mountains alleviated the symptoms of tuberculosis. Exposure to fresh air became the preferred treatment for tuberculosis until the early 20th century.
Tropical Medicine and Climate
Hot climates and meteorological influences have long been associated with specific tropical diseases such as malaria because the malaria parasite and its host, the Anopheles mosquito, require specific climatic conditions to survive and multiply. Cyclical climatic changes can also lead to epidemic outbreaks, as in 1878 when an El Niño weather system turned the normally temperate North American Southern winter into a tropical climate followed by the worst yellow fever epidemic in American history.
International Medicine and Public Health
The French government initiated and hosted the first of 14 International Sanitary Conferences in 1851 to standardize international quarantine regulations mainly against the spread of cholera. These conferences provided an international forum for medical administrators and researchers to discuss not only cholera but also other communicable diseases. Ultimately, this spirit of international cooperation inaugurated the World Health Organization in 1948 to direct and coordinate intergovernmental health activities.
Sanitation and public health were early concerns in Chinese history. They included the provision of wells to supply fresh drinking water and emphasis on the prevention of infectious diseases. During the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE) and the Song dynasty (960–1279 CE), medicines were distributed during various epidemics.
Vaccine Campaigns in China
Chinese traditional medicine classified symptoms of smallpox under the syndrome “cold damage,” which, since the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), explained febrile and contagious diseases in terms of external agents acting on the human body. Beginning in the early 19th century, Westerners introduced the smallpox vaccine in Macau and Canton with limited success. These and other attempts to supersede various methods of variolation with vaccination against smallpox led to tension between Western immigrants and Chinese authorities, and traditional variolation was still practiced mainly in China’s rural areas during the early 20th century.
Plague Vaccination in India
After claiming about 300,000 lives during the first Indian plague epidemic (1896–1897), a second plague epidemic began in Bombay in 1904 that lasted three years. Together, these epidemics claimed an estimated 3 to 4 million lives. In late 1896, Waldemar Mordecai Haffkine’s research team at Bombay’s Grant Medical College developed a vaccine that significantly reduced plague mortality.
The Manchurian Pneumonic Plague, 1910–1911
This plague outbreak in August 1910 originated in the Trans-Baikal region and spread over 1,000 miles across Manchuria, killing 60,000 people by March 1911. The carriers of this pneumonic plague were wild marmots trapped for their fur by inexperienced Chinese migrant laborers working in Manchuria. The disease spread quickly along the Chinese Eastern Railway in September 1910 after the first reports appeared of cases in the crowded migrant camps.
After the Manchurian plague subsided, the newly founded North Manchurian Plague Prevention Service laid the groundwork for China’s public health system, whose preventive measures reduced fatalities during the next Manchurian pneumonic plague epidemic in 1920.
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Selected Contagion Resources
This is a partial list of digitized materials available in Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics. For additional materials on the topic “Colonialism and International Medicine,” click here or search the collection’s Catalog and Full Text databases.
Web Pages
Images
Lantern slides, 1910–1911 Manchurian Pneumonic Plague. From the Papers of Richard Pearson Strong, 1911–2004, 1911–1945 (bulk). Center for the History of Medicine/Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine—Harvard Medical School.
Publications
Vaccination
Tropical Medicine and Climate
International Medicine and Public Health
Vaccine Campaigns in China
Zhang, Lu. Zhang shi yi shu. [China: s.n.], Kangxi 48 [1709].
Plague Vaccination in India
Nathan, R. The Plague in India, 1896, 1897. Simla: Printed at the Govt. Central Print. Office, 1898.
The Manchurian Pneumonic Plague, 1910–1911
References
The following sources were used in writing this page.
Anderson, W. “Where Is the Postcolonial History of Medicine?” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, New York and 79 (1998): 522-530.
Arnold, David. Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth–Century India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Arnold, David., ed. Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500-1900. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.
Curtin, Philip D. Death by Migration: Europe’s Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Harrison, Mark. Public Health in British India: Anglo–Indian Preventive Medicine, 1859–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Koplow, David A. Smallpox: The Fight to Eradicate a Global Scourge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Kumar, Anil. Medicine and the Raj: British Medical Policy in India, 1835–1911. Vol. 103, No. 2. (Apr., 1998), pp. 373–418.
MacLeod, Roy M. and Milton James Lewis, eds. Disease, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion. London: Routledge, 1988.
Meade, Teresa A. and Mark Wallker, eds. Science, Medicine and Cultural Imperialism. London: Macmillan, 1991.
Watts, S. J. Epidemics and History: Disease, Power, and Imperialism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
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