The healthy body in the age of revolution

Colonial Warfare, Disease, and the Making of the Modern Body

keywords: colonial medicine; military medicine; racial theories; 18th-century medicine

Often accurately called the first world war, the Seven Years War (1756-63) established Britain as the greatest military and imperial power of the modern age. British victories were won in North America, the Caribbean, Europe, the west coast of Africa, India, and even the Philippines. Like all pre-modern wars, far more troops were to die from disease than battle injuries, especially in tropical climates. British victory depended on adaptation to foreign environments, through the adoption of native troops, styles of warfare, and habits of living. At the same time, British imperial might was secured through its demonstrated superiority - not only of military prowess, but also of physical difference as manifested by disease. For contemporaries, these were fundamentally linked in the notion of discipline: both a physical and moral characteristic.

Fighting alongside native and American-born troops in North America, alongside black troops in the Caribbean, and alongside sepoy regiments in India, Europeans observed differences in how bodies responded to disease. In the American colonies, British officers noted that American-born soldiers were much more sickly, theorizing that this was a result of naturally weak and lazy physical constitution - a characteristic also observed in laggardly American political institutions. In India and the West Indies, European bodies did not adapt as easily to the climate as had been hoped; by the end of the war, officials were suggesting that European and native bodies were fundamentally different - an idea which hardened into theories of biological race. Disease, understood as a disorder within an individual's constitution, was best prevented through a regularly ordered lifestyle. Physical and cultural superiority was thus to be maintained through discipline: the drilling of European-style military discipline for native regiments throughout the world, and the self-discipline that would characterize the British overseas: abstaining from all excess and maintaining the stiff upper lip that was to ensure good health and clear thinking in dangerous environments.

This paper demonstrates that this first global war is fundamental to our understanding of how theories of the modern body and European military superiority were shaped in the context of the emerging British imperial state. Based on the experience of war, modern theories of the relationship between the body and mind crystallized, particularly the nature of racial difference, self-discipline, and environmental influence on the formation of national characteristics.

Dr Erica Charters

University Lecturer in the History of Medicine

University of Oxford

Images of the Disabled Body and the American Revolution

This paper explores the relationship between representations of the disabled body, identity and citizenship at the time of the American Revolution. At the cusp of medical advances that would expand in the nineteenth century, the lives of physically disabled people in the mid eighteenth century were shrouded in an interplay of religious, medical and cultural understanding. The War for Independence resulted in increased bodily difference and physical disablement at a time when these differences had traditionally been equated with earlier stages of evolution, poverty and denial of citizenship. Parallel developments saw disability infusing the rhetoric of both Patriot and Loyalist propaganda as the colonies separated from Britain, in visual metaphors, in print, and the spoken word. This brought bodily difference to public awareness in a way that had never happened before.

Although the pictorial representations of the Revolution altered understandings that physical abnormality evidenced earlier evolutionary stages, it replaced this relationship with one that presented disability as reductive and debilitating on both the individual and collective level. Using colonial and English images published throughout the colonies in the mid eighteenth century, this paper shows how physical disability was used by satirists and officials on both sides of the Atlantic to garner support for their respective causes. The gendered emblematic images of disability with which the new nation was confronted catered to prevailing ideas of the importance of independence and autonomy, imprinting the relationship of disability with dependence, fallibility and inability. It further established expected norms of the ‘ideal’ body.

Ultimately visual imagery, description, and rhetoric of the Revolution activated audiences’ cultural stereotypes of disabled bodies; these were issues with which the whole of American society had to reconcile itself.

Amy Renton

University of Cambridge

Health in the eighteenth century British Royal Navy

Unlike mainstream eighteenth century society, naval personnel were closely monitored. The thousands of seamen, whether volunteers or pressed, were extremely valuable and the Admiralty devoted a great deal of time, effort and money to providing food, drink and medical care of the best quality. When completed in 1761, Haslar Naval Hospital was the largest brick building in the world.

Sailors were fed a diet which provided 5,500 calories a day, which kept them plump and warm. By the outset of the Seven Years’ War captains knew that to keep their crews healthy they needed more than preserved foodstuffs. Huge efforts were made to provide fresh beef and vegetables of all kinds to vessels at anchor and on blockade. Dr Lind had made the connection between scurvy and lemons, but regrettably, until the right advice was given to the Admiralty, lemons were not provided in the eighteenth century.

Captains dreaded the onset of scurvy amongst ‘the people’, and used every means in their power to delay the onset, such as sauerkraut, oil of vitriol, scrupulous cleanliness, ventilators, whitewash, etc. However, when soldiers came on board they often brought with them from land-based barracks deadly typhus or small pox, which flourished in the congestion on board. The West Indies introduced yellow fever or malaria for which there was no cure.

It is high time a direct comparison was made between the health of the Navy and that of the Army and civilian population.

Bryne McLeod

University of Exeter