ABSTRACT
Considering cases from Europe to India, this collection brings together current critical research into the role played by racial issues in the production of medical knowledge. Confronting such controversial themes as colonialism and medicine, the origins of racial thinking and health and migration, the distinguished contributors examine the role played by medicine in the construction of racial categories.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter 1|28 pages
Introduction
Historical and contemporary perspectives on race, science and
medicine
chapter 2|29 pages
Western medicine and racial constitutions
Surgeon John Atkins' theory of polygenism and sleepy distemper in the
1730s
chapter 3|22 pages
From the land of the Bible to the Caucasus and beyond
The shifting ideas of the geographical origin of humankind
chapter 5|22 pages
Racial categories and psychiatry in Africa
The asylum on Robben Island in the nineteenth century
chapter 8|22 pages
Changing depictions of disease
Race, representation and the history of ‘mongolism'
chapter 12|30 pages
‘New men, strange faces, other minds’
Arthur Keith, race and the Piltdown affair (1912–53)
