Coming ‘Home’ to (post)Colonial Medicine: Treating Tropical Bodies in Post-War Britain
نویسنده
چکیده
While investment and popular enthusiasm have fuelled significant growth in the history of medicine since the 1980s, it remains by some metrics well outside of the historical mainstream. Yet developments in the history of medicine could offer traction to historians more generally. Through its close critical attention to power, embodiment and hegemonic institutions and knowledges, the history of medicine also presents a unique perspective from which to interrogate ‘postcolonialism’. Here, post-war British examples demonstrate the potential of a medical and postcolonial lens for historians exploring policy making, immigration or identity. In this period, civil servants, biomedical researchers, policy makers, and publics including migrants actively shaped medical and governmental responses to an apparently novel phenomenon: the mass migration to Britain of its former tropical subjects. Postcolonial analysis uncovers new models of community, and highlights the importance of the late twentieth-century and the post-imperial city as sites of historiographic and theoretical development.
منابع مشابه
Harnessing the Power of Difference: Colonialism and British Chronic Disease Research, 1940–1975
Recent studies of post-war chronic disease epidemiology have generally focused on the histories of research in the USA and UK. Using the archival records of a major British funding body, the Colonial Medical Research Committee and its successor the Tropical Medical Research Board, this article demonstrates the advantages of bringing a post-colonial analytic to this historiography. It highlights...
متن کاملAsylum provision and the East India Company in the nineteenth century.
Studies on the history of medicine and psychiatry in former British colonies have multiplied in recent years.1 The relevance of medicine and psychiatry in Britain to the development of colonial medicine and psychiatry within various Anglo-Saxon colonial settings has been firmly established.2 Yet the existence of any reverse impact is less certain. Although historians who specialize on developme...
متن کاملRisk factors for post-traumatic stress disorder among UK Armed Forces personnel.
BACKGROUND There is considerable interest in understanding further the factors that increase the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) for military personnel. This study aimed to investigate the relative contribution of demographic variables; childhood adversity; the nature of exposure to traumatic events during deployment; appraisal of these experiences; and home-coming experiences in ...
متن کامل‘The bones tell a story the child is too young or too frightened to tell’: The Battered Child Syndrome in Post-war Britain and America
This article traces the emergence of child abuse as a medical concern in post-war Britain and America. In the early 1960s American paediatricians and radiologists defined the 'battered child syndrome' to characterise infants subjected to serious physical abuse. In the British context, paediatricians and radiologists, but also dermatologists and ophthalmologists, drew upon this work and sought t...
متن کاملColonial and post-colonial aspects of Australian identity.
Since the 1988 Bicentennial and the 2001 centenary of federation celebrations colonial images have flourished in Australia, highlighting the roles of convicts and free settlers during early colonization. Old sites, such as Port Arthur have been re-invigorated, and in 2004 Tasmanians celebrated the bicentenary of 'white' settlement. However, social scientists have given little attention to the r...
متن کامل