Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenor:
-
Poonam Bala
(Cleveland State University)
Send message to Convenor
- Discussant:
-
Cristiana Bastos
(Universidade de Lisboa)
- Location:
- Sala 0.06, Edifício I&D, Piso 0
- Start time:
- 17 July, 2015 at
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
The proposed panel will focus on the trajectory of transfer of medical knowledge and traditions located within different socio-cultural milieu.
Long Abstract:
Medical knowledge and transfer in the coloniesThe trajectory of spread of medical knowledge between the colony and metropole has long been a subject of discussion that paves the way for new understanding on how scientific and medical knowledge has been transferred. New theories of understanding the ecological surroundings and the local cultures went a long way in unraveling the dynamism and cultural exchange. While new ways of defining the colony informed western medicine, concomitant colonial expansion facilitated deeper interactions and encounters between western biomedicine and medical traditions. The strength of medical traditions, thus, lay in the extent to which medical knowledge as an institutionalised body of knowledge was able to sustain aspects of competition, accommodation and acceptance of medical knowledge which formed the core of medical pluralism. If medical and technological innovations inspired these aspects, then colonial expansion and the strength of medical traditions provided an impetus to transfer of medical knowledge in the colonial context.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Philip Havik (Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical (IHMT))
Paper short abstract:
HAT’s spread into the African interior propelled tropical medicine into recesses of empire; either ‘side’ was unfamiliar with the others’ medical traditions. The present paper focuses on these parallel circuits of knowledge and their particular dynamics in former Portuguese Africa and beyond.
Paper long abstract:
The campaigns against HAT during the early 1900s as the epidemic grew were marked by the emergence of tropical medicine as the new science equipped with 'magic bullets'. As HAT catapulted the microbiological revolution into the recesses of empire, in the African interior, it propelled human and material resources into an unknown hinterland. The radical measures tropical medicine engendered brought it into contact with local medical traditions which as HAT spread across the continent were also obliged to deal with a novel threat to people's well-being and livelihoods. In some areas however where HAT had been endemic for some time, local healers were very much aware of the disease and developed methods to counter it. Like tropical medicine, these ideas and methods also 'travelled' as populations migrated and were the subject to quarantine, tests and trials. However these 'bodies of knowledge' operated in different circuits that interacted on an irregular basis - If at all - so that their dynamics were generally autonomous and rarely inter-dependent. The present paper wishes to address the particular dynamics of these circuits of knowledge, and the diverse ways in which their encounters occurred depending on the natural environments and social contexts in which they took place. In order to do so, it compares experiences in different localities and regions in Africa, including former Portuguese colonies such as Angola and Guinea with other, neighbouring areas where HAT became the focus of control and eradication campaigns.
Oana Cristina Baboi (University of Toronto)
Paper short abstract:
Referencing Jesuit Padre François de Rougemont’s manuscript of medical notes composed while in the mission fields of India and China, my paper discusses the construction of medical knowledge in the contact zones and its circulation in the 17th century between Asia and Europe.
Paper long abstract:
How Jesuits in the mission fields in Goa, Macao and other parts of China took care of their own health and that of the local people they were trying to convert? While relatively much is known about the Jesuits' scientific efforts to disseminate Indian and Chinese medical knowledge and materia medica to Europe, little is known about the cross-cultural interactions with local networks through which they acquired, reconfigured, and constructed knowledge of Asian remedies and therapeutics. The Flemish Jesuit François de Rougemont (Belgium, 1624-China, 1676) on his way from Lisbon to his missionary destination in China, via Goa and Macao, gathered a collection of medicinal plant descriptions, remedies and therapeutics. His manuscript, known as Breve Compendio de Varias Receitas de Medicina and currently preserved at the Bibliotèque Nationale de France, presents a rare opportunity to investigate how compiling botanical and medical knowledge in 17th century Portuguese holdings in India and China participated in the creation of global networks of medical knowledge and materia medica originating outside Europe.
My presentation introduces Padre François de Rougemont, his collection of medical notes, his missionary itinerary and the presumed medical skills he attained along the way. Following examples of medicines acquired, tested, and even prepared by the Jesuits, it discusses how copying, translating, and editing recipes and remedies collected from India and China by de Rougemont and other fellow missionaries participate in the construction of medical knowledge. In the conclusion, it shows how this constructed medical knowledge circulated between Asia and Europe.
Fabiano Bracht (University of Porto) Amélia Polónia (University of Porto - Faculty of Arts)
Paper short abstract:
This paper intends to present the current state of our PhD research centred on medical manuscripts produced in 18th century Goa. Besides contextualising their production, it aims at characterizing the local agents responsible for the production of such knowledge and debate its possible hybridism.
Paper long abstract:
This paper aims at submitting to discussion a research project developed under the PhD program in History of the University of Porto. It is centred on the analysis of the production of medical texts in Goa, during the 18th century, and their circulation in Europe. The discussion will be centred on two analytical axes. Firstly, it intends to identify and characterize the agents who produced such knowledge. Who were they? Where did they study and with which kind of intellectual setup did they interact with? Secondly, we will focus on the characteristics of the produced knowledge: was it based in a more European or autochthone background? Can we identify a hybrid medical knowledge containing elements of both European and Indian traditions? And at what extent did it contribute at the renovation of European medical practices?
Aro Velmet (New York University)
Paper short abstract:
In the 1890s, deratization was imported from Denmark to French Indochina as the cutting-edge means for plague control. I argue that in an attempt to legitimate bacteriology, the problems of importing a technology designed for Nordic cities into tropical colonies were systematically overlooked.
Paper long abstract:
In the 1890s, the bubonic plague emerged in Southeast Asia as a major challenge for colonial governments. The French scientist Alexandre Yersin identified the plague microbe and proposed several cutting-edge measures for eradicating the scourge. The most labor intensive of these measures was deratification, a process first used in Copenhagen in 1896 and then quickly imported to the tropics and implemented by the Public Works Department with the support of the Pasteur Institute, among the most respected French scientific bodies.
This paper seeks to understand why deratification was so enthusiastically imported to French Indochina, even though its ineffectiveness in colonial tropics quickly became apparent. I focus on the rhetorical connection between 'progress' and 'good governance' formed at international health conferences, and the political geography of transnational movement that enabled this particular exchange. I argue that both Danish public health authorities and Pastorian researchers used the language of 'universal progress' at international conferences to make themselves and their technological innovations credible at home, thereby occluding the need for localization of the deratization process.
Pedro Prata Andrade (Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade do Porto)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I explore several episodes of contact and mutual influence between the Persianate medical culture of Deccan and Mughal India and the Portuguese medical practitioners of the Estado da Índia.
Paper long abstract:
In the Mughal Empire and in all of the major Deccan Sultanates numerous Persian physicians practiced and took prominent court positions, having a notable influence on the Indo-Muslim medicine of Modern India. As a result of the intense relations between the Portuguese Estado da Índia and mainly Bijapur, Ahmadnagar and the Mughal Empire this Persianate medical milieu contacted in several pivotal moments with Portuguese medical practitioners of different origins and backgrounds in a reciprocal exchange of practices and knowledge.
In this article those interactions are explored, highlighting Garcia de Orta and his alleged incursions into Ahmadnagar.
Monique Palma (University of Porto)
Paper short abstract:
This paper centered on the study of surgical practices and knowledge between Portugal and Brazil in the eighteenth century. Discuss how surgical practices and discourses produced by surgeons both from Portugal and Portuguese America reflect and provoke changes in the academic and practical knowledge
Paper long abstract:
The paper submits to discussion an ongoing PhD project centered on the study of surgical practices and knowledge between Portugal and Brazil in the eighteenth century. It aims to discuss how surgical practices and discourses produced by surgeons both from Portugal and Portuguese America reflect and provoke changes in the academic and practical knowledge. The paper aims at questioning at what extent the exchange of knowledge between Brazil and the metropolis contributed to an improvement of surgical practices. Surgical and medical treaties produced simultaneously in Portugal and Brazil, as well as descriptions of empirical uses of surgery will be scrutinized. Those materials will be analyzed under common knowledge about the renovation of the standard bases of Natural Philosophy in Europe, as well as under discussions concerning the new standing of Surgery towards Medicine, considering academic training, scientific academies, knowledge circulation and social status of surgeons in Portugal in the eighteenth century
Heidi Gengenbach (University of Massachusetts Boston)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores rural struggles around nutrition assessment technologies in central Mozambique, introduced through ongoing “Green Revolution” programs to reduce rural hunger, in the context of two centuries of Portuguese colonial and post-colonial state efforts to classify and control rural African diets.
Paper long abstract:
For the past decade, Mozambique has played a prominent role in the "New Green Revolution for Africa" (GR4A), a donor-funded initiative to enhance food security by commercializing smallholder agriculture. As a result, Mozambique has witnessed a burgeoning of national policies, bureaucratic machinery, scientific expertise, and "public-private partnerships" aimed at addressing its crisis levels of chronic and acute malnutrition. Yet because the GR4A paradigm conceptualizes hunger as not only a biomedical condition of nutritional want, but also a gendered social problem requiring unprecedented intervention in the lives of women farmers—"the agents instrumental to food security" (World Bank 2006)—its implementation has required a battery of new technologies for bodily and behavioural nutrition assessment, whose purpose is to legitimize ongoing efforts to "improve" agrifood systems historically managed by rural women. Preliminary research into the effectiveness of these donor-driven assessment technologies suggests that despite the profusion of data they have generated thus far, women's resistance to nutritionally couched interventions in rural foodways is significantly impeding both the state's "hunger knowledge" and GR4A progress to date.
This paper argues that ongoing struggles to measure hunger in Mozambique cannot be understood without reference to state efforts to classify and control African diets in the colonial past. In central Mozambique, Portuguese perceptions of local food systems as deficient date back to the 1600s, and fuelled intensifying farmer-state tensions from ca. 1800 on. Oral history and archival sources reveal this neglected nutritional terrain of colonial politics, memories of which inform farmer responses to GR4A interventions today.