European and non-European medical practices: India and the West Indies, 1750-1900. CURRIE, Simon. Available from the Sheffield Hallam University Research Archive (SHURA) at: http://shura.shu.ac.uk/20652/ A Sheffield Hallam University thesis This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author. When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given. Please visit http://shura.shu.ac.uk/20652/ and http://shura.shu.ac.uk/information.html for further details about copyright and re-use permissions. CollegiateLearning Centre Collegiate Crescent"Campus Sheffield S102QP 101 807 123 7 REFERENCE ProQuest Number: 10701299 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a com plete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. uest ProQuest 10701299 Published by ProQuest LLC(2017). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States C ode Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106- 1346 European and Non-European Medical Practices: India and the West Indies, 1750-1900 Simon Currie A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Sheffield Hallam University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy July 2005 ABSTRACT This thesis compares the interaction between British doctors and Indian medical practitioners with that between such doctors and African-Caribbean practitioners during the period 1750 to 1900. This in-depth analysis is contextualized within a longer time- scale and against a broader global background. Comparison is made firstly in terms of racial and cultural attitudes and how these affected interaction. Some British doctors in India disparaged indigenous practices. In the West Indies, denigration of the African was paralleled with a lack of interest in slave medical practices. Western medicine was dominant as part of the British administration in India, by coercion at plantation level in the Caribbean. These contrasts are highlighted in this thesis. While "rational empiricism" began to replace the humoral dogmatism of Western medicine from the 1770s, the Indian systems and slave medicine were both seen as consisting of "mere" empiricism, lacking in science or theory. Nevertheless, this thesis challenges David Arnold's view that by the nineteenth century British doctors were dismissive of Indian systems and practitioners. Conversely, Richard Sheridan's assertion that British doctors adapted their practice through learning from African- Caribbean medicine is strongly opposed in the thesis. Arnold overstates the rejection, Sheridan the acceptance. British doctor-botanists identified the plants in indigenous Indian medicines. They could also find succedaneums directly, bypassing indigenous lore. They advised other doctors on botanical issues. Their major role in interaction in India has not been looked at previously. Sheridan's labelling those in the West Indies as "doctor-scientists" overrates their status while Arnold's calling those in India "gentlemanly" underrates it (the second has already been challenged in the literature). Nineteenth century texts of materia medica were plant-based, including many Indian drugs; they were made obsolete in the 1870s by the advent of chemical pharmacology. This fault-line between botany and chemistry halted systematic examination of recently elucidated plant-based remedies for a hundred years from 1860. The thesis suggests that it was more important in reducing medical interaction than were broader factors such as concepts of dominance and racial superiority as put forward by Arnold. New World drugs which had long been part of the Western materia medica, such as quina-bark and ipecacuanha, held their own and were developed chemically. Early botanists on the Indian subcontinent produced work which also lasted. In Spanish colonies, cultural syncretism between Spaniards and Amerindians included medicine; in this thesis it is contrasted with the absence of any comparable syncretism allowed by the British in India or the Caribbean between the ruling class (administrators or plantocracy) and the non-white populations. 2 Table of Contents Title Page 1 Abstract 2 Table of Contents 3 Preface and Introduction 5 Introduction 9 References to Introduction 19 Some Relevant Quotations 22 Chapter I 23 Colonialism Race and Medical Interaction India and West Indies, 1750-1900 Government and authority 25 Culture and racial attitudes 29 Western science and education in British India 40 British West Indies 50 Chapter II The Changes in Western Medicine, 1750-1900 72 Chapter III British Responses to Non-Western Medicine, British India and West 121 Indies, 1750-1900 Chapter IV Doctor-Botanists in British India and West Indies, 1750-1900. 173 Their input on medical interaction. Chapter V Comparisons in Time and Space. 218 3 The wider context of European colonialism and interaction between Western and other medical systems Colonial culture, government and society 221 Western medicine 231 Indigenous medicine: its interaction with European 241 medicine Doctor-botanists and medical interaction 259 Conclusions 281 Appendix I: Biographical Details i. Appendix II: Bibliography i. 4 EUROPEAN AND NON-EUROPEAN MEDICAL PRACTICES: INDIA AND THE WEST INDIES. 1750-1900 PREFACE AND INTRODUCTION This thesis is concerned with the interaction between Europeans, doctors and laymen, and indigenous people. Specifically, it discusses what exchange there was of medical skills and remedies between British doctors and Indian or African-Caribbean practitioners across the chosen period of a hundred and fifty years. For the purposes of this thesis, the term "interaction" is taken to mean the meeting of such doctors; it is preferred as representing a less meaningful phenomenon than would terms such as "interchange" or "collaboration". The thesis originated from wondering what ship's doctors made of any medical practices that they encountered. For instance, there were ship's surgeons on the voyages which James Cook [1728-79] made between 1768 and 1779. This was also true of George Vancouver's North Pacific journeys later in the same century. Such doctors usually doubled as naturalists and even as prototype anthropologists. Their studies represented one of the scientific aspects of the Enlightenment; new discoveries would mean benefits for mankind. It became clear that the peripatetic nature of these journeys meant that there could be little real interaction. Parts of the world where there was more prolonged contact included India. At Sheffield Hallam University, Dr Mark Harrison became my first supervisor. His area of interest comprised nineteenth-century India. In addition, he was working on concepts of tropical climate underlying disease, in the British West Indies as well as in India. This was a matter of global importance by the eighteenth century, even if its roots went back to Ionian Greek Hippocratic theories on the causes of illness. The main focus for the current study was developed. This was medical interaction in British India and West Indies across a period of major change, 5 socially and medically. My second supervisor has been Prof. Barbara Bush; her interest in the Caribbean has aided me in trying to achieve a better balance in the work. In addition, I have felt from the outset that the narrow picture should be set against the background of interaction on a wider scale. Thus it should take in colonization from the sixteenth century onwards and that on a global scale. In particular, this has meant the inclusion of the Spanish American empire. There were changes in the cultural and social situations and in the medical practices of Britain, India and the West Indies which determined the selection of 1750 to 1900 for the narrow focus. Changes were also a factor in the choice of Spanish America, where there were two periods of particular interaction, one to do with medicine in the late sixteenth century and one involving natural sciences and exploration in the late eighteenth. To avoid distracting from the main focus of the work, this broader part of the comparative study has been confined to a final chapter. A specific issue is that of the terms which should be used for non-European people. "Non-white" and "non-Western" are possible as generic alternatives even if they are negative terms. The word "indigenous" is inappropriate for African-born or even creole (Caribbean-born) slaves, particularly when indigenous Caribs persisted in some parts of the West Indies. Ironically, the term "slave" itself is accurate and non- polemical, though after emancipation it becomes a misnomer, despite the labouring populace of freed men (and women) remaining slaves in all but name. On the other hand, "black", or more allowably "Black", as noun or adjective, is generally avoided in the modern literature, to be replaced by the clumsier description "African-Caribbean". In India, "indigenous" is appropriate, but the generic term "Indian" is an inaccurate one; even differentiating Hindu and Muslim, with their separate medical traditions, takes no account of the many varieties of medical practices, from folk to Mogul court. In the 6 current thesis, the aim is to combine the most clarity and consistency with the least offence. Most medical historians are no longer medically qualified: their training as historians is of more importance than any as medical clinicians or scientists. Indeed, the two disciplines record information very differently. Nevertheless, for the purposes of the current thesis, medical knowledge has been of some value in the consideration of such primary sources as materia medica (which comprise lists of ingredients for medicines and the usage of these).