Medicine and International Relations in the Caribbean: Some Historical Variants

Medicine has long framed race relations in the Caribbean-that basin where African and European cultures have met from the beginning of the Colonial Period to the twentieth century. Whether Sir Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum and President of the Royal Society of London, who as a physician wrote about African medical beliefs and practices, or Dr. Leonard Wood, military physician who served as military governor to Cuba, medicine and its practitioners have played a key role in the perception of the African Other. The book is a collection of essays treating the subject from various points of views. While it may perhaps not surprise the reader that colonial physicians often failed to acknowledge the same failings in their own Western medicine as that criticized of African practices, the medical view found later in the period lacked that biting racism of an earlier era.