Kristin Hussey opens part one of her excellent Imperial Bodies in London: Empire, Mobility, and the Making of British Medicine, 1880–1914 with the dispatch in 1889 of Rudyard Kipling, poet, author, and apologist for the British Raj, from India to London for his health. In London, Kipling quickly fell ill, noting how his health was strained by repeated bouts of fever and dysentery in India. For Hussey, chronic, and recurrent disease clung to returning empire builders. While there is an excellent literature on Western medicine in colonial contexts, on the colonial as a site of knowledge production, or on the networks between colonies, little is known about the experiences of those colonials who returned back to Britain. Hussey places their experiences at the center of Imperial Bodies in London to explore how metropolitan medicine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was imperial medicine.
Although Hussey raises important questions about the relationships between medicine and the wider British Empire, Britain's Indian Empire and London dominate her account; the first because the transient colonists working in India expected to return to Britain, and the second as the hub of the British Empire and British medicine. To show how London and medicine were part of a “networked empire in motion” (182), Hussey's deft contextualization and use of micro-studies reveal the complex ways in which empire re-made metropolitan British medicine. To bring to light the uneven, unequal, and often unexpected ways that mobile imperial bodies and their embodied diseases left an indelible mark on British medicine, Hussey draws on a range of analytical tools from geographical theory to consider the colonial and the domestic within the same conceptual frameworks of mobility, networks, and spaces. Hussey blends these approaches with insights from the new imperial history and global cosmopolitanism. The result is a nuanced, layered, and lively account full of human stories, from the home life of the parasitologist Patrick Manson to the lives of working-class Londoners and their use of Indian oculists.
Hussey's examination of tropical medicine in the British medical marketplace perceptively shows how the London medical profession had to react to the needs of a mobile imperial population whose physical and mental health blurred the lines between the colonial and the domestic. And it is the quotidian that repeatedly captures Hussey's attention. Hence, Hussey's focus in Imperial Bodies in London is not on familiar infectious diseases but on understudied diseases. In part one, Hussey first considers the everyday through how the dangers of tropical climates and ideas of re-acclimatization in Britain became a quotidian feature of the British medical marketplace as revealed by the experiences of, and advice literature on, digestive disorders. Hussey then turns in chapter 2 to sunstroke insanity and how it was widely used in London as a conceptual tool to understand psychiatric distress in Europeans, an understanding that did not upset notions of white superiority. In part two, the movement of bodies is replaced by the everyday mobility of medical knowledge between London and wider networks of empire. Here Hussey's focus shifts first to failing eyesight in chapter 3 and then in the final chapter to the science revealed through microscopic examinations of the hidden cargo of parasites found in a range of imperial bodies. Rather than being at a distance, through the quotidian, Hussey brings empire into the metropolitan hospital, asylum, courtroom, medical school, laboratory, and home of medical practitioners.
Attuned to questions of race and power, Hussey adroitly examines how race and racial hierarchies were crucial to the movements and networks she explores. While such an approach is a familiar one, her chapters on sunstroke insanity and cataract surgery offer a different context through which to examine how race and power were imbricated within British medical thinking. Yet, as Hussey makes clear in the conclusion, the nonhuman world in the form of environmental factors, technologies, published material, animals, insects, parasites, and pathological specimens were also an integral component of the mobilities, networks, and knowledge creation she explores. Hussey's insights are part of a growing trend that rethinks the relationship between people and empire to uncover the role and nature of the so-called nonhuman empire. As Hussey shows throughout Imperial Bodies in London, European colonizers were keenly aware of their place in a wider environment that was “often unknowable and sometimes dangerous” (179) and that to ignore the body's embeddedness in the nonhuman worlds is to miss a key component of how patients and practitioners understood the imperial body.
While Hussey is attuned to race and class, highlighting the physical and mental toll on the imperial bodies considered, these bodies are primarily the male colonial residents who moved back to London whether in the form of patients or practitioners. Less space is given to indigenous peoples. When they are considered, they are viewed not as actors but through how male metropolitan practitioners drew on racial hierarchies to construct their constitutions (chapter 3) or as subjects of desire in Manson's parasitological research (chapter 4). Questions surrounding masculinity are only briefly touched upon in chapter 2, while the experiences of women receive scant attention, limited to a brief examination of Elizabeth Wright and her admission to the Royal Indian Asylum. Notwithstanding these lacunae, Hussey provides a fascinating and thought-provoking account that both draws on and challenges a range of historiographies about the nature of medicine and empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In showing how imperial medicine was not elsewhere but everywhere, with Imperial Bodies in London Hussey offers a fresh perspective on the history of medicine and empire that interweaves the movements of peoples, insects, parasites, blood, disease, and knowledge in a postcolonial account of the transformation of British medicine at the height of the British Empire.
