Is alcohol a tropical medicine? Scientific understandings of climate, stimulants and bodies in Victorian and Edwardian tropical travel.
Name
is-alcohol-a-tropical-medicine-scientific-understandings-of-climate-stimulants-and-bodies-in-victorian-and-edwardian-tropical-travel.pdf
Description
visibility:open
Size
802.69 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (CRC64NVME)
gQyA+npLkgs=
Resource type
Journal article
Date published
September 24, 2021
Abstract
This paper offers a new perspective on historical understandings of the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body, by studying the way that British explorers of tropical Africa drank alcohol and wrote about drink between 1850 and 1910. We demonstrate that alcohol was simultaneously classified as a medicinal, a preventative and a pleasurable drink, shaped by competing medical theories, but that distinctions between these different roles were highly blurred. We also show how many explorers thought certain drinks helped to protect white bodies from the effects of tropical diseases. While popular amongst travellers, these views came under growing scrutiny in the latter part of the nineteenth century, reflecting both changing scientific views about the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body and the development of a much larger European presence in tropical Africa. However, even those who opposed tropical drinking often supported the use of other stimulants and viewed the tropics as uniquely dangerous. As such, the paper challenges the idea that the late nineteenth century marked a paradigm shift in scientific attitudes towards tropical environments, as much previous scholarship has suggested. At the same time, our examinations of explorers’ descriptions of drinking by African people demonstrates how ideas about racial difference played an important role within medical understandings of alcohol. Overall, this paper examines the heterogeny of attitudes to alcohol to be found within tropical medicine and documents the continuities in approach shown between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Funder
| Funder name | Awards |
Arts and Humanities Research Council, United Kingdom | Techne - Techne National Productivity Investment Fund |
Royal Historical Society, United Kingdom | |
Huntington Library, United States | |
Journal title
The British Journal for the History of Science
Volume
54
Publisher
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Place of publication
Cambridge, UK
ISSN
0007-0874
eISSN
1474-001X
Official URL
Rights statement
In Copyright