ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Problematising Colonial Instructions: The Global Context of Scientific and Medical Information, 1650-1850

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This session will examine the important cultural history of scientific and medical instructions within colonial contexts. Though prevalent in popular manuals, university lectures, society bylaws and government paperwork, instructions related to health and the natural world are seldom treated as an object of enquiry. Yet, as the papers of this session reveal, instructions offer deep insight into the skills, values and practices that contributed to the creation, implementation, and problematisation of official or implied modes of information-gathering employed physicians, surgeons, naturalists and health inspectors operating in colonial contexts. Such actions then contributed to the further collection and interpretation of natural history and health management data used by local and national governments to make decisions about people with little access to political or social power. The papers in this session explore these topics by examining a range of instructional genres used to collect objects and information about the natural world and human body from circa 1650 to 1850. Several genres will be explored, but specific attention will be paid to naturalist instructions, parliamentary questionnaires, scientific society queries and plantation health manuals. Overall, the papers to offer new insights into the colonial history of scientific and medical instructions that were implemented in Europe, Africa, Asia and South America.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Anita Guerrini, Oregon State University, and University of California Santa Barbara

Individual Presentations

• Portable Practices: Linnaean Instructions and Colonial Fieldwork - Linda Andersson Burnett, University of Uppsala

• Public Instructions, Colonial Distances: Prize Questions in the Batavian Society of Arts and Sciences (c. 1770-1800) - Maria Iulia Florutau, Cambridge University

• ‘Designed for the Disordered Negroes’: Yaws Management Experiments in the Age of Abolition - Katherine Paugh, Oxford University

• The Bureaucracy of Bias: Epidemiology and William Fergusson’s Statistical Re-Interpretation of Government Instructions in Sierra Leone - Matthew Eddy, Durham University