Colonialism and health: the Nineteenth-Centurymedical perception of the human-nature relationship

Abstract

This article aims to analyze prebacteriological medical thinking about the relationship between humans, nature, and health/disease processes. This understanding is believed to have been shaped by the dominant economic and geopolitical interests of the time. European experiences in the Caribbean, the Americas, and West Africa were crucial in shaping medical thought, where medicine served as a tool for imperial expansion. It is argued that exposure to the biological diversity of regions deemed “tropical” or “exotic” influenced the Nineteenth-Century medical narrative, which viewed “other natures” and “other bodies” as both dangerous as necessary. An analysis of the medical geographies of colonial regions or those with a colonial past reveals four key concepts: supremacy, spatial pathologization, the correlation between climate and race, and acclimatization.