Medicine in a ‘new’ world:

the Columbian Exchange

HI31L

Lecture 2

Medicine in a New World

I. The Columbian ExchangeA. Pre-Columbian MedicineB. Contact: Conquerors, Settlers and Slaves1. America the Inferior: Virgin

Soil and “weak” races2.Triangle Trade/ South Atlantic

System

II. Responses and interventions in Colonial MedicineA. Humoral MedicineB. Innovation and resistance

Pre-Columbian Medicine

“There was then no sickness: they had no aching bones; they had then no high fever; they had then no small pox; they had then no burning chest; they had then no abdominal pain; they had then no consumption; they had then no headache. At that time the course of humanity was orderly. The foreigners made it otherwise when they arrived here.”

Chilam Balam (a Yucatan Indian), of Chumayel, after Conquest.

Indigenous Medical Institutions

South America (Mixed settlement pattern, urban +

rural)Botanical gardens/zoosIsolation compounds for the

contagious sickState granary networkDistant water supplies for citiesCollection of refuse and night-soilMedical facilities for soldiersDeliberate ‘bioprospecting’ in

conquered areasTrade in medicinals

Indigenous Medical Institutions

North America (Settlement pattern at contact

rural/nomadic)Sweat lodgesDistinct class of medical

practitionersTrade in medicinals

Conquest of Mexico

The ‘Columbian exchange’

To Americas From Americas

Smallpox, measles, malaria (falciparum), plague, tuberculosis

Syphilis (probably), yellow fever, yaws

Cattle, horses, wheat, bananas, coffee, sugar cane

Potatoes, tomatoes. maize, squashes, peppers, tobacco

African slaves, European conquistadors, settlers

Precious metals

North America

Crops Cals/HectareMaize 7.3Potato 7.5Yams 7.1Cassava 9.9

Europe

Crops Cals/HectareRice 7.3Wheat 4.2Barley 5.1

Oats 5.5

Eating the New World, Building the Old

Contact: Brave New World or America the Inferior

This coastline, too, was swarming with people and it would seem, if we are to judge by those areas so far explored, that the Almighty selected this part of the world as home to the greater part of the human race.

God made all the peoples of this area, many and varied as they are, as open and as innocent as can be imagined … utterly faithful and obedient both to their own native lords and to the Spaniards in whose service they now find themselves. … At the same time, they are among the least robust of human beings: their delicate constitutions make them unable to withstand hard work or suffering and render them liable to succumb to almost any illness, no matter how mild. Even the common people are no tougher than princes or than other Europeans born with a silver spoon in their mouths and who spend their lives shielded from the rigours of the outside world.

A Short Account of the Destruction of the IndiesBartolome de las Casas, 1542

Aztec Smallpox (Codex Mendoza)

Contact: Conquerors, Settlers and Slaves

America the ‘inferior’

“There was no Indian town where hostility was shown [to the settlers] ‘but that within a few days after our departure from every such town, that the people began to die very fast and many in a short space…the disease was also so strange that they neither knew what it was nor how to cure it; the like, by report of the oldest men in the country never happened before time out of mind.’” Settler account, 1587, Roanoak Island.

Contact: Conquerors, Settlers and Slaves

America the ‘inferior’ “The Indians died on heapes, as they lay in their houses, and the living that were able to shift for themselves would run away and let them dye, and let their carcases ly above the ground without burial … and the bones and skulls upon the several places of their habitations made such a spectacle after my coming into those partes that as I traveled in the forest near the Massachusetts, it seemed to me a new-found Golgatha.’

Traveller’s account, 1622, Massachusetts

Contact: Conquerors, Settlers and Slaves

America the ‘inferior’

“The Indians die so easily that the bare look and smell of a Spaniard causes them to give up the Ghost” – 1699

Contact: Conquerors, Settlers and Slaves

America the ‘inferior’

“We have no discoveries in the materia medica to hope for from the Indians in North-America. It would be a reproach to our schools of physic, if modern physicians were not more successful than the Indians, even in the treatment of their own diseases.”

Dr. Benjamin Rush 1798

Triangle Trade/ South Atlantic System

“At the same time, they are among the least robust of human beings: their delicate constitutions make them unable to withstand hard work or suffering and render them liable to succumb to almost any illness, no matter how mild.”

Bartolome de las Casas, 1542

The Triangle Trade• Trade goods, weapons, later

rum, from Europe and North America to Africa (to buy slaves)

• Slaves from Africa to North and South America (to labour on plantations)

• Raw materials produced with slave labour to North America, Europe (to feed industrial growth and production and pay for more slaves)

Responses and interventions in Colonial

Medicine• Humoural Medicine

Systemic in concept and approachBased on 4 humours: blood, phlegm,

black bile, yellow bileEach (and thus entire body)

dynamically related to environment, body intakes and excreta, emotions, seasons, stars

Thus treatment highly individualized… at least in theory

Innovation and resistance

•Use of indigenous materia medica and techniques

• Inoculation for smallpox

Useful Websites

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Mendoza

• http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/475030

• http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/if_you_knew_01.html