“‘They dyed miserably in heaps’: Reports from Colonial Jamaica”

Katherine Johnston (Beloit College)

Abstract coming.

“‘A little Heterodox’: Polygenism, Race-Science and ‘Race-Medicine’ in the British Enlightenment”

Suman Seth (Cornell University)

In 1735, the former naval surgeon John Atkins penned what must be considered one of the more striking understatements of his age. In A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West-Indies, he described the difference between the physical appearance of the inhabitants of Guinea and that of “the rest of Mankind”: “tho’ it be a little Heterodox,” he acknowledged, “I am persuaded the black and white Race have, ab origine, sprung from different-coloured first parents.” Polygenism was, of course, considerably more than a little heterodox. Unusual in his polygenism, Atkins was also unusual both in spending very little time in relating his heterodoxy to Biblical views and in proffering his most detailed remarks within a medical text.

The fact that Atkins espoused polygenism in the same work in which he described diseases peculiar to native Africans led one of the few scholars to consider his texts in any detail to suggest that one might find “connections between concepts of race and concepts of disease.” That Atkins gave up on his polygenism in a later edition of the Navy-Surgeon (1742) without significantly changing his etiological understanding leads me to the opposite conclusion. In the 1730s, I suggest, environmentalist understandings of physical difference were beginning to change. Environmentalist understandings of disease, however, particularly with regard to the diseases of warm climates, were not. Atkins provides us with a fine example of a trend that would continue for the majority of the century: the widening gap between ‘race-science’ and ‘race-medicine.’

“Constant Change: Culture, Health, and Race in the Revolutionary United States”

Sarah Naramore (University of Notre Dame)

According to accepted eighteenth-century physiology, human bodies, health, and cultures lived in a tenuous balance with their environment. Despite this seemingly clean narrative, it grew up in a sea of contradictions and challenges from the realities of colonialism. Notably, the reality of different peoples living in the same location despite cultural and physical variation. In the United States climate alone could not clearly account for human difference. White, black, and American Indian peoples inhabited the same regions but exhibited, from the perspective of White intellectuals, clear differences. At the same time, the self-conscious development of a new republican nation by those same white intellectuals altered the way they thought about their own physical and cultural distinctiveness.

This paper analyzes American physician Benjamin Rush’s environmentalist view of health and culture while exploring racial difference. Looking at his ethno-physiological oration, “An Inquiry into the Natural History of Medicine Among the Indians of North-America,” I show how Rush’s thoughts about “racial” characteristics developed in the North American colonies, and later independent states. In it, Rush compares American Indian physiology and culture with that of the British as an exercise in demonstrating the relationships between climate, culture, and health. Although written in 1774, Rush included it in his anthologized medical texts as late as 1802. Its persistence demonstrates Rush’s dedication to a fluid notion of “race.” Furthermore, it shows how in becoming “American,” inhabitants of European descent sought a physical and cultural balance between the “savage” and “decadent” informed by medical knowledge.

“‘The Uncertainty of Living’ on Hudson Bay: British and Indigenous Bodies and the Healthfulness of Cold”

Emelin Miller (University of Minnesota)

The historiography of disease and bodies in the eighteenth century has largely focused on the relationship between health, environment, and empire in the context of the Tropics. Inspired by this fruitful scholarship, this paper addresses the philosophy of healthy bodies in the Far North. From Hudson Bay Company letters and publications, British fur trader-naturalists in the North American Arctic made clear their insistence upon the theoretical “healthfulness” of northern climates. However, these proclamations of the Arctic’s benefits to human health were unevenly distributed. Though the British felt a historical and climatological kinship with northern climes, identifying as northerners and settling in the north since the sixteenth century, they insinuated that the British body and lifestyle was ill-suited to Arctic regions. British fur traders complained of frequent afflictions by a multitude of illnesses while describing the miraculous stoutness of indigenous peoples, communities who, in Britons’ view, were never ill or possessed cure-all remedies, despite conveniently ignored records of epidemic disease, starvation, and frostbite.

This talk explores the intellectual, medical and socio-cultural rationale for these contradicting testimonies of climate and healthfulness. Contrasted with eighteenth-century medical ideas about warm climates, it becomes clear that the British imperial mindset upheld a threshold in which civilized bodies could thrive, leading to similar portrayals of non-white bodies in both cold and hot regions. I argue that these proclamations of northern healthfulness, despite contradicting testimonies of illness and disease, reveal one way in which British imperial strategies for ‘improvement’ were upheld by theories of natural history and medicine regardless of the realities of Arctic living.