Is alcohol a tropical medicine? Scientific understandings of climate, stimulants and bodies in Victorian and Edwardian tropical travel

Dados Bibliográficos

ID8395253
AutoresEdward Armston‐sheret (0000-0001-6927-9060, Royal Holloway University of London, autor correspondente), Edward Armston-Sheret, Kim Walker (0000-0002-2617-4768, Royal Holloway University of London)
Ano2021
Volume54
Fascículo4
Páginas465-484
Data de publicação2021-12-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoThe British Journal for the History of Science (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0007-0874 • E-ISSN: 1474-001X
EditoraCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s0007087421000649
PMID34558394
OpenAlexW3201120536
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas35

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 c. 1850 and c. 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

Archaeology · Biology · Geography · Political science · Scholarship · Scrutiny · Tropical climate · Tropical marine climate · Tropical medicine · Tropics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Ecology · History · Law · Medicine