Conclusions

Medicine has been involved with exploration, imperial expansion and colonisation from the very beginning. When Europeans explored the globe, built trade empires and settled in newly acquired territories, they encountered new and often severely debilitating diseases.

How successful have the efforts of physicians in the colonies been? The first statistical reports produced by the World Health Organization indicated that the results were mixed. The incidence of smallpox, yellow fever, plague and cholera has dropped significantly across the globe. Simple hygiene measures have become generally accepted, and more care for expectant mothers and newborn children has become available, which has resulted in lower infant and maternal mortality rates. By contrast, dysentery, lung infections and tuberculosis are still prevalent, while endemic malnutrition and mental health are largely neglected. Sleeping sickness and malaria continue to decimate populations during difficult economic times. In specific areas, their incidence is even higher in comparison to colonial times as a result of the acceleration of migration, urbanisation and over-ambitious and misdirected irrigation efforts.

Notes

1 Quoted in Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT, 1972), p. 219.

2 William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York, 1977).

3 Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical.Nature (Ithaca, NY, 2001).

4 Peter Boomgaard, ‘The Making and Unmaking of Tropical Science: Dutch Research in Indo­nesia, 1600-2000', Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI), Vol. 162, No. 2-3 (2006), pp. 191-217.

5 On de Orta, Bontius and Boerhaave, see Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT, 2007). On the expansion of scientific knowl­edge of physicians working in the tropics in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries see also Mark Harrison, Medicine in an Age of Commerce and Empire, 1660-1830 (Oxford, 2010).

6 Daniel R. Headrick, Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (Princeton, NJ, 2010), p. 22.

7 Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 5, 18.

8 Mariola Espinosa, Epidemic Invasions: Yellow Fever and the Limits of Cuban Independence, 1878-1930 (Durham, NC, 2009), p. 2.

9 Quoted in Hans Pols, ‘Notes from Batavia, the European's Graveyard: The 19th Century Debate on Acclimatization in the Dutch East Indies', Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 67, No. 1 (2012), p. 133.

10 Warwick Anderson, ‘The Trespass Speaks: White Masculinity and Colonial Breakdown', American Historical Review, Vol. 102 (1997), pp.

11 Nicolaas A. Rupke, Medical Geography in Historical Perspective (London, 2000).

12 Michael Worboys, ‘Germs, Malaria, and the Invention of Mansonian Tropical Medicine: From “Diseases in the Tropics” to “Tropical Diseases”', in David Arnold (ed.), Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500-1900 (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 184-185.

13 Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British Imperialism in India, 1600-1850 (New Delhi, 1999).

14 Eric T. Jennings, Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (Durham, NC, 2006).

15 Thomas Colvin, ‘The Real Expedition de la Vacuna and the Philippines, 1803-1807', in Laurence Monnais and Harold J. Cook (eds), Global Movements, Local Concerns: Medicine and Health in Southeast Asia (Singapore, 2012), pp. 1-23.

16 Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981).

17 During the first meeting of the WHO, which took place in Geneva in 1948, the League of Nations Health Organisation's Oriental Bureau and the OIHP merged and became part of the new international organisation.

18 Ronald Ross Archives, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, ‘Letter to William C. Gorgas, March 23 1914', quoted in R. Patterson, ‘Dr. William Gorgas and his War with the Mosquito', Canadian Medical Association Journal, Vol. 141, No. 6 (1989), p. 599.

19 Laurence Monnais-Rousselot, Medecine et Colonisation: I’aventure Indochinoise, I860--1939 (Paris, 1999).

20 Kenneth J. Carpenter, Beriberi, White Rice, and Vitamin B: A Disease, A Cause, and A Cure (Berkeley, CA, 2000).

21 Patrick Manson, Tropical Diseases: A Manual of Diseases of Warm Climates (London, 1898), p. vxi. The latest edition of Manson's manual, the 22nd, was released in 2005.

22 Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC, 2006).

23 Mary Sutphen, ‘Not What but Where: Bubonic Plague and the Reception of Germ Theories in Hong Kong and Calcutta, 1894-97', Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 52, No. 1 (1997), pp. 81-113.

24 David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (Manchester, 1993).

25 ‘Europeans in the tropics', British Medical Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1,880 (1897), p. 94.

26 G.C. Cook, ‘Early History of Clinical Tropical Medicine in London', Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Vol. 83, No. 1 (1990), p. 39.

27 Roy MacLeod and Milton Lewis (eds), Disease, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion (London, 1988).

28 Lyautey's speech at the Journees Medicales de Bruxelles, 26 June 1926, reproduced in H. Lyautey, Paroles d'Action: Madagascar, Sud Oranais, Oran, Maroc (1900-26) (Paris, 1927), p. 443.

29 Liesbeth Hesselink, Healers on the Colonial Market: Native Doctors and Midwives in the Dutch East Indies (Leiden, 2011).

30 Ming-Cheng M. Lo, Doctors within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (Berkeley, CA, 2002); Warrick Anderson and Hans Pols, ‘Scientific Patriotism: Medical Science and National Self-Fashioning in Southeast Asia', Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 54, No. 1 (2012), pp. 93-113.

31 Laurence Monnais, Michele Thompson and Ayo Walhberg, Southern Medicine for Southern People: Vietnamese Medicine in the Making (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2012).

32 Steven Palmer, Launching Global Health: The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation (Ann Arbor,

2010).

33 Theodore M. Brown and Elizabeth Fee, ‘The Bandoeng Conference of 1937: A Milestone in Health and Development', American Journal of Public Health, Vol. 98, No. 1 (2008), pp. 40-43.

34 Paul Farmer, Infections and Inequalities: The Modern Plagues (Berkeley, CA, 1999).

Further reading

Anderson, Warwick, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham, NC, 2006).

Arnold, David, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (Manchester, 1993).

Cook, Harold J., Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven,

2007).

Curtin, Philip D., Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1989).

Harrison, Mark, Medicine in an Age of Commerce and Empire, 1660-1830 (Oxford, 2010).

Headrick, Daniel R., The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1981).

MacLeod, Roy, and Milton Lewis (eds), Disease, Medicine, and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion (London, 1988).

Monnais-Rousselot, Laurence, Medecine et colonisation: l'Aventure Indochinoise, I860--1939 (Paris, 1999). Packard, Randall, The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria (Baltimore, 2007). Palmer, Steven, Launching Global Health: The Caribbean Odyssey of the Rockefeller Foundation (Ann Arbor,

2010).

Vaughan, Megan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (New York, 1991).