Emergence Of Tropical Medicine Research Articles

The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France by Michael A. Osborne

Reviewed by: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France by Michael A. Osborne Richard C. Keller Michael A. Osborne. The Emergence ofTropicalMedicine in France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. ix + 312 pp. 1ll. $50.00 ( 978-0-226-11452-1). For a literature that scarcely existed twenty-five years ago, the historiography of colonial science and medicine has flourished in the intervening period. As the field of postcolonial studies has expanded, so too has that of the role of science and medicine in the making of empire. Clinicians and experimenters saw the empire as a combination of proving ground and goldmine, a space in which they could safely test the boundaries of scientific practice while also harvesting new illnesses to document and treatments to ratify. From Saigon to Cayenne, from Manila to Havana, from Hong Kong to Bombay to Cape Town to Cairo, if European physicians and scientists set foot there, we have a monograph to document it. So what is there left for historians of colonial medicine to write? [End Page 450] Plenty, as it turns out. Michael Osborne's The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France is a meticulously researched book that breaks important historiographical ground. Osborne calls into question a number of common assumptions about medicine in the French empire, and produces as a result a smart book that will become an essential reference for historians of empire and European medicine. The book challenges the inherited wisdom about the place of Paris in medical education, the centrality of Algeria to the French empire, and, to an extent, the periodization of the new imperial history. Perhaps because of the bloody struggle for its liberation and the sheer scale of European colonization there, Algeria has been for many historians the centerpiece of the French empire. Yet significant colonization in Algeria only began after the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, making it a relatively late addition to the empire. Moreover, it was relatively unique among France's colonies, given the French army's critical role in both conquest and administration (although one could certainly add the neighboring Tunisian and Moroccan protectorates to this group). Yet the French Maghreb was anomalous within the empire, as Osborne argues: most of France's colonies were conquered and administered through the navy rather than the army, making this branch of the armed forces the crucible of French imperial management for much of the modern period. Osborne thus begins his book with a chapter on the making of the modern French navy, beginning in 1689. Here, Osborne focuses on the importance of place in the making of institutions, putting the Atlantic ports of Brest and Rochefort as well as the Mediterranean port of Toulon under the spotlight, which became not only significant naval installations, but also critical sites for military medicine in a newly rationalized navy. By the 1730s, these were the central locations for naval surgical training and were among the few locations outside of the rarified world of Parisian academic medicine for medical education. Subsequent chapters follow important developments in the history of tropical medicine. Osborne traces the evolution of hygienism and medical geography of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as they developed into a new science of race as viewed through the lens of yellow fever in particular. Throughout the book, the uses of medicine for naval objectives—as well as the capacity of a medi- calized armed force to develop new knowledge in colonial settings—provides useful insight into the transformation of medical paradigms. The book then describes the gradual decline of these naval hospitals under the Third Republic, and their eventual displacement by new colonial medical institutions in Paris and Marseille by the beginning of the twentieth century. This is not a story of Latour's "Pasteurian style" in action. Although Osborne discusses Pasteur and his followers throughout the book, the focus is on naval medicine as the critical armature of colonial medicine through the nineteenth century. Osborne thus provides an important complement to studies of the globalization of the Pasteur Institutes as the foundation of French tropical medicine. He also narrates a fascinating story about how tropical science intersected with naval agendas. Jean...

The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France by Michael Osbourne

The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France, by Michael Osbourne. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2014. 328 pp. $50.00 US (cloth). In this volume, Michael Osbourne traces the entangled histories of naval and colonial in France from the Napoleonic era through to World War I. Weaving together the biographies of key doctor-reformers with major shifts in naval regulatory regimes, Osbourne examines how the life worlds of port cities and their inhabitants shaped the production of knowledge about health and hygiene in ways that were highly localized. This book therefore serves as a useful contribution to the historiography of nineteenth century French medicine, least because it privileges the periphery of maritime France over Paris as the primary site of inquiry. It also turns the history of tropical on its head, focusing on the field's development in France rather than in the colonies. In doing so, however, it develops an uneasy relationship with the recent historiography, which has largely moved beyond hagiographies of white men to consider the local developments of knowledge across cultures and within burgeoning international scientific networks as a way of resisting the metropole and nation as the dominant frame of analysis. This book is really about one specific variant of tropical in France as understood and practiced by medical naval officers, and therefore provides a valuable but only partial view of the field's development. The book begins with the birth of the French navy via the 1689 ordinance that formalized its separation from the civil sphere and led to the creation of dedicated naval hospitals, medical schools, prisons, and arsenals. These new institutions clustered in the port cities of Brest, Rochefort sur Mer, and Toulon, which were marked by rich and variant regional medical traditions. While the navy was in charge of colonial for much of the nineteenth century, reforms inaugurated under the Third Republic eventually yielded precedence to civilian and army medicine. Naval medical activities accordingly shifted to the cities of Bordeaux, Marseille, and Paris, marking a new moment in the history of French imperialism as well as the emergence of a new universal tropical medicine (10). Many of these transformations are tracked through the naval careers of doctors like Raphael Blanchard and Felix-Alexandre Le Dantec, whose experiences point to the tensions that existed both within and across the various branches of the French bureaucratic state. Perhaps the most novel contribution of the book concerns the importance of place, defined here as not only a point on a map ... also a site of meaning and attachment, one to which value is assigned, often through the textured facts of experience and memory (4). For Osbourne place as a mode of analysis operates on two registers. The first is the distinctive social and disease ecologies of port cities and the ships that moved in and out of them. The second refers to the experience of living in these places, including the interactions of naval doctors with bureaucratic regulations that drove disparities in salary and opportunities for advancement. …

The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France

The idea of naval medicine as a specific and discrete art is richly illustrated in The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France, Michael Osborne’s historical account of French colonial medicine. For expanding European empires, the nineteenth century was a time when theories of tropical disease evolved as responses to distinct challenges on ships, in colonies, and in home ports. In France, a system of provincial medical schools was built by the navy in the port cities of Brest, Rochefort-sur-Mer, Toulon, and Bordeaux. Each faculty held to and taught their own system of medical knowledge retained within the regional boundaries. As described in this book, beliefs on causality and therapeutic options remained divided among the discrete spheres among institutions. The lack of accepted curricula seems a distant reminder of the many gains made before evidence-based medicine. To enrich the perspective, most of the book’s content is set in advance of the study of medical geography, which settled some longstanding misconceptions about ethnicity, location, and disease. Confusion reigned in colonial settings because of the similarity of causes implied during outbreaks of yellow fever, cholera, plague, typhus, and typhoid fever. This book does not address the scientific advancements on infectious etiologies; rather, it provides the context for French innovation within colonial functionaries, clashing ideologies, and commercial considerations. Medical training played a pivotal role in French colonial activity, as in Madagascar in 1895, when expeditionary forces were decimated by the thousands from malaria. While the prevailing belief was that tilled and swampy land caused the illness, that belief was overturned, by persons with medical training, in favor of insect bites. Success in Madagascar, as well as other overseas colonies, depended upon knowing disease cycles and managing interaction in the human populations. This book is a worthwhile investment for those interested in historical narratives on tropical medicine previously unavailable in the English language. Naval physicians like Charles-Adolphe Maher did remarkable studies while touring the tropics. In 1823, after having studied at Rochefort, he spent 2 years voyaging and encountered yellow fever outbreaks in Havana and Veracruz. Within the confines of his ship, Maher carefully compared the spectrum of symptoms. His conclusion on intermittent fever being a variety of malaria was far from correct, yet Mahler did initiate brave comparisons of therapies among patients, albeit with bloodletting and dietary privations. Maher’s lifelong findings on medical statistics, Statistique Medicale de Rochefort, first published in 1874 and recently reprinted, recount the lively experiences of Mahler and many other persons investigating medicine exotique. Osborne’s book provides key insight regarding influential persons who revolutionized notions of disease, recognizing their contributions as harbingers for the vast developments to follow in the twentieth century.

Michael A. Osborne. The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France.

Michael A. Osborne. The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France.

Michael Osborne, The emergence of tropical medicine in France

Michael Osborne, The emergence of tropical medicine in France

Michael Osborne, The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France

Michael Osborne, The Emergence of Tropical Medicine in France

The emergence of tropical medicine in France

The emergence of tropical medicine in France

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

A Cuban Scientist Between Empires: Peripheral Vision on Race and Tropical Medicine

The article explores explores a conjuncture in the emergence of tropical medicine at the end of the 19th century, as it was transformed from a heterogeneous ensemble of multi-sited research endeavours into a unified discourse reproduced within an institutional network of US and British imperial medicine. The effect this had on Latin American-based research into tropical medicine is traced through the case of the Cuban ophthalmologist and medical research entrepreneur, Juan Santos Fernández. Between 1898 and 1900, as the Spanish empire gave way in Cuba to the United States occupation and a neo-colonial future under US tutelage, Santos Fernández abruptly changed his position on a number of key questions in tropical medicine, backing the priority and originality of Carlos Finlay's work on yellow fever and rejecting both the proposition that diseases differed according to race and the idea that there were pathologies specific to the tropics. The article suggests possible connections between this scientific shift and Santos Fernández's political inclinations as a former Autonomist and a Hispanophile.

The emergence of tropical medicine in Portugal: The School of Tropical Medicine and the Colonial Hospital of Lisbon (1902-1935)

The School of Tropical Medicine was founded in 1902 along with the Colonial Hospital of Lisbon. The Portuguese government recognized the importance of colonising the tropics and therefore supported the creation of a specific locus of medical training that would prove to be crucial to the clinical and experimental study of tropical diseases. This paper examines the importance of such institutions for the emergence of a new scientific area of research while also functioning as a consolidation factor for the Third Portuguese Colonial Empire. The creation of a new concept of medical practice with respect to tropical diseases characterizes a specific aspect of colonization: it underlies and drives the discourse of colonization itself. Consultation of data collected by the Portuguese Tropical School and the Colonial Hospital during the period between 1902 and 1935, the starting point of the present study, seeks to shed light on the ongoing debate concerning the history of tropical medicine within European colonial discourse.

Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500-1900

Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500-1900

ARNOLD, David. Warm climates and western medicines. The emergence of tropical medicine, 1500-1900

ARNOLD, David. Warm climates and western medicines. The emergence of tropical medicine, 1500-1900