Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire

The history of medicine and empire is a robust subject that has drawn the attention of several first-rate scholars over the past three decades, with fresh approaches in ever-more abundance. Although the medical entanglements of many imperial regimes—as well as local resistances and “alternatives”—are now much in evidence, the British Empire continues to dominate the English-language literature, most especially in its “Atlantic” form, much of which is about the Caribbean. To that branch of the literature Seth brings an approach cultivated in the history of science, arguing that the responses of medical authors to the problem of disease and its treatment in the British West Indies gave rise to conceptual distinctions that enabled empire, including what he terms “race-medicine.” From a close reading of the several books written by eighteenth-century English physicians who had experience practicing on the sugar islands, he produces a “postcolonial history of colonial medicine” that is...