ABSTRACT
The aborigine that crystallized in the Andamans during the armed clashes of the 1850s and 1860s was, to a considerable degree, a creature constituted by interconnected processes of labor and medicine. The savage of Dickens and Henry Maine projected an existential aversion to toil. This meant a disinterest in work associated with civilization as well as subalternity: not only the labor of cultivation and manufacture, but the menial work of servants, slaves and sepoys. Medical interest in the Andamanese goes back to the outset of the second settlement. Mouat, who was aware that high death rates among the convicts had brought about the abandonment of the first colony, began the medical study of living and dead Andamanese bodies as soon as he could get his hands on them.1 By the early 1860s, the Asiatic Society was taking an interest in the corpses of Andamanese who died in colonial hospitals,2 and in the next decade E. H. Man became intrigued by constipation, diarrhea and aboriginal responses to Dr. De Jonghi’s Castor Oil.3 Man and Portman both took a sympathetic interest in indigenous medicine, which found a niche in anthropology when Britons no longer took it seriously as treatment.4
