Opium smoking,anti‐Chinese attitudes,and the American medical community, 1850–1890

During the 1870s and early 1880s, members of the American medical community sought to exclude the Chinese from immigrating to the United States because these physicians believed that the Chinese opium smoking habit threatened the moral system of the country. Doctors were especially concerned about the supposed effects of opium smoking on sexual behavior, arguing that it both heightened male and female desire and endangered the nation's reproductive capacity. They also feared that opium smoking and Chinese prostitution would encourage miscegenation, and that use of the drug could ultimately harm America's socio‐economic progress. The conclusions of these physicians fed into the anti‐Chinese campaign that resulted in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882.     

Bodily differences?: Gender, race, and class in Hans Sloane's Jamaican medical practice, 1687-1688

Despite the multitude of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British medical publications regarding empire and health, Hans Sloane's A Voyage To the Islands [of] Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica (1707) was the first to incorporate significant numbers of female and African patients among its printed case histories. Comprising some sixty-four pages of the introduction, this unique set of records affords scholars the rare opportunity to examine how patients (of both sexes and races, various ages, and all social levels) residing in a "torrid zone" were diagnosed and treated by an English physician during the 1680s. Sloane had expected to encounter illnesses vastly different from those found in England when he arrived in Jamaica, but after practicing medicine in Jamaica for over a year, he concluded that there existed very little difference in the manifestation of illnesses in different climates. Although some ailments were sex-specific and culture-specific, for the most part Sloane transgressed categories of gender and race by diagnosing and treating all his patients according to the same medical ideology. And although it did not directly challenge accepted medical views, Sloane's Voyage revealed incongruities in dealing with such categories within the context of early imperial medicine.     

From union clinics to barefoot doctors: healers,medical pluralism,and state medicine in Chinese villages, 1950–1970

This paper explores the dynamic differentiation and reorganization of healers within a plural medical system from the birth of the union clinics in the early 1950s to the popularization of barefoot doctors in Chinese villages in 1970. After 1949, the state started to mobilize individual medical practitioners to form union clinics that implemented a system of fees for services, individual accounting, self‐responsibility for profits and losses, democratic management, and distribution according to each contribution. The union clinics became the township‐level medical agencies following the establishment of county hospitals. These developments indicated the beginning of the dynamic differentiation of a plural medical system and formed the basic structure of the state medical system in 1950s–60s. Through the complete reshuffling of healers within the plural medical system, by 1970 barefoot doctors were embedded in the reorganized rural medical world of Chinese villages.     

Medicine,health and medical practice in precolonial Khoikhoi society: An anthropological‐historical perspective 1

Summary

This paper explores the role and function of medicine, and medical practices in precolonial Khoikhoi society, South Africa. It argues that medicine and medical practice was deeply imbedded in Khoikhoi society at the time of colonization, proving that a sound culture of medicine and health existed for centuries.     

Diagnostic uncertainty and medical geography: what are we mapping?

The administration of the Canadian health care system requires the collection of large quantities of health data that some health researchers have used to map the spatial distribution of disease. The authors discuss the difficulty of separating genuine geographic variations in health and disease from geographic differences in how diseases are diagnosed, and how these diagnoses are represented in an administrative data system. Although there have been attempts to deal with this problem at the international scale, little research has considered the issue at intranational or intraprovincial scales. There are several strategies available that can help separate spatial patterns of disease from nonmedical confounders, though they remain largely untested in medical geography. Future research should consider the scale of the problem and the effectiveness of existing approaches in mitigating the effects of geographic diagnostic inconsistency on the representation of health statistics in space.     

Whither medical anthropology?

Alan Harwood. Rx: Spiritist as Needed. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1977. xi + 251 pp. $22.50.     

Judaism and communism: Hanukkah,Passover, and the Jewish Communists in Mandate Palestine and Israel, 1919–1965

This article explores the mythological, ritualistic, and symbolic aspects of the ways in which the festivals of Hanukkah and Passover were celebrated by the Jewish Communists in Mandate Palestine and the State of Israel. It illustrates how elements of Zionist-socialist culture were adopted by Jewish Communists and integrated in their cultural activities. In a gradual process starting in the1920s and culminating in the mid-1960s, the Jewish Communists created a combination of Marxist ideology and Zionist-socialist cultural practices. However, when a group of young Sabra activists reinforced the Zionist-socialist elements, the balance was undermined, contributing to the rift within Israeli communism.     

Examinations,access, and inequity within the empire: Britain,Australia and India, 1890–1910

Recent scholarship on transnational immigration restriction have tended to frame British policies in opposition to those of white settler colonies, emphasising the frustration of British officialdom at the explicitly racist exclusions in South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. While acknowledging these, this paper interrogates the British position, by locating synergies between the deployment of examinations as a form of racial gatekeeping at the height of the empire, with reference to discourses of equity and access emanating from Britain, Australia and India. It reads British attempts to ameliorate the harsh exclusions of the White Australia policy – administered through the apparently neutral device of the Dictation Test – alongside remarkably similar constraints embedded in the exams for the Indian Civil Service that were designed to limit the numbers of Indians in the ICS. Race-based immigration restriction was consistent with – not repugnant to – imperial sensibilities, contrary to so many protestations. The prevalence of racially discriminatory immigration legislation in settler societies had the effect of projecting the worst forms of racism to the peripheries of empire, exposing the contradictions of the colonial project in India.