In Medicine in Colonial America, Oscar Reiss recognizes the theories and practices exercised by colonial physicians, and illustrates the gradual evolution of Dark Age medical ignorance to the beginnings of modern-day enlightenment. Reiss identifies the various levels of training for physicians from extensive schooling at respected universities to the informal instruction of mountebanks and quacks. He illustrates the numerous, unorthodox methods including bleeding, vomiting, purging, and cupping, used by both charlatans and educated practitioners alike to treat disease, and weighs the quality of colonial life against the available medical knowledge of the day. Reiss discusses the early attempts to license physicians, competitive pricing of medical service, colonial surgery and early autopsies, and cites important medical breakthroughs and theories. An interesting and informative read, Medicine in Colonial America will be of great value to physicians, nurses, pharmacists, and dentists as well as historians.

This volume shows how the study of medicine can provide new insights into colonial identity, and the possibility of accomodating multiple perspectives on identity within a single narrative.

What was the medical marketplace? This book provides the first critical examination of medicine and the market in pre-modern England, colonial North America and British India. Chapters explore the most important themes in the social history of medicine and offer a fresh understanding of healthcare in this time of social and economic transformation.

An original study focusing on the primacy placed on physicians and medical care to generate population growth and increase the workforce during the late eigteenth century in colonial Peru.

Colonial Pathologies is a groundbreaking history of the role of science and medicine in the American colonization of the Philippines from 1898 through the 1930s. Warwick Anderson describes how American colonizers sought to maintain their own health and stamina in a foreign environment while exerting control over and “civilizing” a population of seven million people spread out over seven thousand islands. In the process, he traces a significant transformation in the thinking of colonial doctors and scientists about what was most threatening to the health of white colonists. During the late nineteenth century, they understood the tropical environment as the greatest danger, and they sought to help their fellow colonizers to acclimate. Later, as their attention shifted to the role of microbial pathogens, colonial scientists came to view the Filipino people as a contaminated race, and they launched public health initiatives to reform Filipinos’ personal hygiene practices and social conduct. A vivid sense of a colonial culture characterized by an anxious and assertive white masculinity emerges from Anderson’s description of American efforts to treat and discipline allegedly errant Filipinos. His narrative encompasses a colonial obsession with native excrement, a leper colony intended to transform those considered most unclean and least socialized, and the hookworm and malaria programs implemented by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s and 1930s. Throughout, Anderson is attentive to the circulation of intertwined ideas about race, science, and medicine. He points to colonial public health in the Philippines as a key influence on the subsequent development of military medicine and industrial hygiene, U.S. urban health services, and racialized development regimes in other parts of the world.

Contagion and Enclaves examines the social history of medicine across two intersecting British enclaves in the major tea-producing region of colonial India: the hill station of Darjeeling and the adjacent tea plantations of North Bengal. Focusing on the establishment of hill sanatoria and other health care facilities and practices against the backdrop of the expansion of tea cultivation and labor migration, it tracks the demographic and environmental transformation of the region and the critical role race and medicine played in it, showing that the British enclaves were essential and distinctive sites of the articulation of colonial power and economy.

Examining the emerging figure of the woman doctor and her relationship to empire in Victorian culture, Narin Hassan traces both amateur and professional 'doctoring' by British women travelers in colonial India and the Middle East. Hassan sets the scene by offering examples from Victorian novels that reveal the rise of the woman doctor as a fictional trope. Similarly, medical advice manuals by Victorian doctors aimed at families traveling overseas emphasized how women should maintain and manage healthy bodies in colonial locales. For Lucie Duff Gordon, Isabel Burton, Anna Leonowens, among others, doctoring natives secured them access to their private lives and cultural traditions. Medical texts and travel guides produced by practicing women doctors like Mary Scharlieb illustrate the relationship between medical progress and colonialism. They also helped support women's medical education in Britain and the colonies of India and the Middle East. Colonial subjects themselves produced texts in response to colonial and medical reform, and Hassan shows that a number of "New" Indian women, including Krupabai Satthianadhan, participated actively in the public sphere through their involvement in health reform. In her epilogue, Hassan considers the continuing tradition of women's autobiographical narrative inspired by travel and medical knowledge, showing that in the twentieth- and twenty-first century memoirs of South Asian and Middle Eastern women doctors, the problem of the "Woman Question" as shaped by medical discourses endures.