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A reissue of a charming little illustrated volume originally published in which walks the reader through the highlights of the history of the University of California. This definitive anthology casts Sinophone studies as the study of Sinitic-language cultures born of colonial and postcolonial influences. Essays by such authors as Rey Chow, Ha Jin, Leo Ou-fan Lee, Ien Ang, Wei-ming Tu, and David Wang address debates concerning the nature of Chineseness while introducing readers to essential readings. A dozen essays from a July conference at the University of San Marino argue that a total shift to electronic information media would trigger wrenching social and cultural dislocations. Among their perspectives are the pragmatics of the new, farewell to the information age, toward meta-reading, hypertext and authorship, and the.
Drawing on a backlist dating to , Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand. The University of California Press This PDF book is become immediate popular in History genre. Home The University Of California Press. The University of California Press. A Brief History of the University of California. Sinophone Studies. The Future of the Book. Senate and General. Ernest Mercier. a close observer of the California environment and would write several. at the University of Berlin, where he had been a student of. of climatic influence on the physical condition of man—to investigate the. When the California State Board of Health was founded in , Henry. the fact that until the last decades of the nineteenth century California. Logan and Gibbons saw their studies of environment and health as indispensable. to securing the successful colonization of California by white.
However, since it was not yet clear what aspects of the environment. point, quantity of clouds, timing of frosts, depth of ground frozen, temperature. of wells and springs, timing of animal migrations and fish runs,. of the human body but also important realms of environmental. The approach of nineteenth-century immigrants to questions of health. certain pathogens. Discussions of causality, whether carried on by physicians. not doubt the virtues of white settlement. But when Logan wrote of the. Extended embed settings. You have already flagged this document. Thank you, for helping us keep this platform clean. The editors will have a look at it as soon as possible. EN English Deutsch Français Español Português Italiano Român Nederlands Latina Dansk Svenska Norsk Magyar Bahasa Indonesia Türkçe Suomi Latvian Lithuanian český русский български العربية Unknown.
Self publishing. Login to YUMPU News Login to YUMPU Publishing. TRY ADFREE Self publishing Discover products News Publishing. Share Embed Flag. Read Chapter 1 PDF - University of California Press Read Chapter 1 PDF - University of California Press. SHOW LESS. ePAPER READ DOWNLOAD ePAPER. TAGS colonization climate diseases european indians physicians environmental native western physician www. You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves. START NOW. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www. Environmental History is jointly published by the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society, Durham, NC.
University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press , Ltd. London, England © by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nash, Linda Lorraine. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn ———5 cloth : alk. paper isbn 0———0 cloth : alk. paper isbn ———8 pbk. paper isbn 0———2 pbk. paper 1. Medical geography— California —History. Environmental health— California —History. Public health— California —History. c2n37 Thomas Logan in Transactions of the American Medical Association, It is typical to think of the colonization of western North America as a process in which Europeans and Americans remade the land by reworking natural environments into forms that were both aesthetically pleasing and materially useful. This is surely true, but it is also true that in earlier eras Americans understood colonization as involving bodily transformation as well. The process could work both ways.
Places could alter bodies as much as bodies could alter places. Despite the political and cultural rhetoric of conquest, those engaged in colonizing western North America recognized that the effort of ten brought substantial physical risks. Western immigration was a gamble in physical, as well as economic, terms. Historians of American expansion have not neglected concerns about health; however, they have overwhelmingly emphasized the disease experience of Native Americans. That the consequences of European disease were horrific for most Indian peoples is certain. But Indians were not the only people who suffered extensively from illness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Diseases that were already familiar to white colonists were not necessarily less debilitating or frightening on that account. Accordingly, concerns about disease and disability permeated much of nineteenth-century European and American culture. But to ignore the disease experience of white immigrants is problematic.
Such a selective focus can in some cases serve to retrospectively naturalize Euro-American colonization. What was historically contingent—European dominance in North America— can come to seem biologically predestined, and the centuries-long struggle between native peoples and Euro-Americans, which was marked by incredible violence, can too easily be rewritten as a passive and unavoidable conquest. By contrast, those engaged in colonization were of ten far less certain of its ultimate outcome, particularly as they waged their own struggles with Native Americans, unfamiliar landscapes, and a host of lethal diseases: cholera, malaria, dysentery, typhus, yellow fever, tuberculosis. Understanding the health concerns of nineteenth-century settlers in western North America requires that we put aside more recent understandings of both the human body and the environment. The one-sided focus on the disease history of Indian peoples can have the effect of rewriting white bodies in contrasting and somewhat ahistorical terms—as clearly bounded, always resilient, and unproblematically cosmopolitan.
But this modern understanding of the body cannot be found in early- or even midnineteenth-century sources. Nineteenth-century bodies, white and nonwhite, were malleable and porous entities that were in constant interaction with the surrounding environment, an environment that retained a complex agency of its own. Disease in the nineteenth century, even when acknowledged to be contagious, was not reducible to specific pathogenic agents or person-to-person contact. Contemporaries understood the causes of disease as spread widely across both bodies and landscapes. Consequently, prospective settlers approached new environments with caution, recognizing that the land itself could be either a font of health or a source of illness. For those who moved west, human bodies were the most sensitive and reliable indicators of place.
Settlers and travelers alike were typically attuned to the reactions of their bodies and to the appearances of those they met. Their physical reactions—the onset of fever, a new sense of vigor, a persistent cough, the timing of menstrual cycles—became important means to understand new places. As settlers set about to alter the landscape, they recognized that the landscape, in turn, might also alter them. Nineteenth-century American medicine eagerly addressed itself to this project, assessing both bodies and landscapes with an eye toward preserving health and whiteness in new locations. In our own health-obsessed time, California stands out as an especially health-obsessed place. But the rhetorical association of California and health was largely a creation of mid-nineteenth-century western boosters. Firsthand accounts of the period of fer a much more equivocal and sometimes negative picture. Although California may not have raised the same level of fears among Euro-Americans that southern Africa or the Caribbean did, we should not then assume that early migrants to the Far West understood their relocation in trivial terms.
There is no obvious reason why they should have. The existence of disease among Indians in California is indicated in part by their extensive knowledge of therapies, which early European observers simultaneously derided and recorded. Among those native remedies that Americans adopted were Eriodictyon californicum yerba santa , a treatment for bronchitis; Rhamnus purshiana cascara sagrada , a well-known cathartic; and Grindelia robusta, used for both lung and skin diseases. By the eighteenth century, Indian peoples were also dealing with an onslaught of new diseases. Scholars have typically assumed that European diseases emerged in California only after the establishment of the first Spanish mission in , but some diseases may have preceded colonization.
There is no question, however, that disease arrived anew with the Spanish. Contemporary scholars concur that venereal diseases both syphilis and gonorrhea were rampant among the Spanish and the mission Indians and had spread to the tribes of central California by In the early nineteenth century Franciscan missionaries reported the presence of consumption, dysentery, and various fevers. A devastating measles epidemic swept the missions in and may also have spread beyond. Smallpox probably arrived in In a smallpox epidemic broke out at Fort Ross on the northern California coast and moved south, killing more than 2, individuals mainly among the Pomo, Wappo, and Wintun. Another epidemic began in among settlers in the Central Valley town of Stockton; it subsequently spread through the valley and foothill regions, affecting mostly the Miwok.
In addition to smallpox and measles, pneumonia, diphtheria, scarlet fever, and tuberculosis were recorded in California prior to the s. Disease undoubtedly played a critical role in the decline of the California Indians. The demographer Sherburne Cook estimated that Indian numbers dropped by 21 percent between and , from more than , individuals to approximately 65, Declines were far higher in the missions than elsewhere, a reflection of both a more concentrated population and the oppressive and of ten violent nature of mission life. In the physician Henry Rollin accompanied a French expedition to California and published an account of the voyage in Paris eleven years later. Of the eight men who occupied this position between and , few left significant records. However, in , at the behest of his superiors, who were concerned by the exceedingly high mortality among mission Indians, Dr.
José Benites wrote a lengthy report summarizing the medical condition of the province. He reported that syphilis, scr of ula, and tuberculosis were common illnesses. Impressions recorded at about the same time by George Heinrich von Langsdorff, a surgeon accompanying a Russian expedition to California , were more favorable. Several epidemics swept through California in these decades, including at least three severe outbreaks of smallpox. Indian tribes throughout central California were catastrophically affected, as were the few white settlers and travelers in the region. Wednesday 31 [July ] Several of our people have been for some days unwell and some symptoms of the fever breaking out among them.
The heat, except for a few days back excessive during the day and a heavy chilly dew in the night, so that our blankets would be completely wet in the morning as we slept in the open air. Besides we of ten had very bad water. Tuesday 6 [August ] Some sickness prevails among the Indians on feather river. The few wretched Indians who remain seem wretched they are lying apparently scarcely able to move. We are unable to learn the malady or its cause. Tuesday 20 [August ] Our sick people get no better, nine more have fallen ill within these two days, making in all 61 that are ill, a good many of them attacked with trembling fits.
Our condition is really deplorable, so many of the people taken ill and no medicines, fortunately not many of the men are yet ill, but is is to be apprehended they soon will fall and that we will soon become so weak that we will not be able to raise camp, and I am afraid to stop lest we die like the Indians the most of the people completely disheartened, and indeed well they may. At the same time, the death toll among resident Indians was almost incomprehensibly high. A rancheria near Yuba City, in the area where the malaria epidemic devastated Native American populations.
Courtesy California Historical Society, FN While malaria is not generally believed to have been endemic to California before the nineteenth century, at least four species of anopheles mosquitoes were. Once what we now understand as the plasmodium parasite was introduced into California , it could spread through those regions that supported large numbers of anopheles. Moreover, the temperate climate and long, hot summers of California were conducive to an epidemic outbreak, as they fostered multiple cycles of mosquito reproduction. The disease, or diseases, that reached California in were the southern extension of an epidemic, most likely of vivax malaria, that had begun on the lower Columbia River in , at Fort Vancouver. Disease then traveled south from the Columbia in the bodies of the trappers and their families. Its overall effect on the Indians of California was as terrible as it had been on the Indians of the Northwest. In Cook estimated Native American mortality in California at 20,; however, he later revised that number upward to 50,, or what he estimated to be one-half the entire Native American population in central California.
Though the numbers cannot be determined with any accuracy, it is clear from contemporary accounts that the epidemic radically disorganized California Indian societies, leaving Indian peoples ill prepared to resist or adapt to the dramatic invasion of their territory that came a decade and a half later with the discovery of gold. Fear of the intermittent and remittent fevers were shared by all western colonists, as well as by those who were long settled in the southern states. Even where death rates from malaria alone were not high, it of ten debilitated much of the population and complicated other, more fatal illnesses. The disease spread rapidly in mosquito-ridden areas such as central California and could easily infect an entire community.
Mosquitoes were an ongoing nuisance to Indians and whites in California , but no one had reason to think them a source of illness. Indians generally interpreted disease as a foreign or hostile object that had entered the body, the result of an of fended or malignant spirit. For most Indian groups in California , the preferred cure was a bloodletting ceremony performed by a shaman, of ten in combination with specific medicines. European cures for fever and ague were similar to those of many Indian tribes and included both bloodletting and quinine. In the nineteenth-century world, bodies were understood differently than they would be in the next century. These ideas would come only with the bacteriological discoveries of the late nineteenth century and their institutionalization in the twentieth. Composed of flows and fluxes— of blood, mucus, saliva, feces, perspiration—the body could easily be either over- or understimulated.
The result was imbalance, and the likely outcome was illness. An improper diet, poor habits, a shock to the system, mental anguish—any of these might push a body out of kilter. But especially important were changes in the external environment. The skin did not close of f an individual, separating him or her from the larger world. These interactions were not only unavoidable; they were critical to health as well as illness. External surroundings could shape the body in both subtle and pr of ound ways. Local surroundings might be managed for better health, but they could never be kept at bay—nor would one want to do so. Health was not the product of successfully closing a body of f from external influences but of intelligently managing the relationship between an individual and his or her surroundings.
Quite the contrary. By the end of the eighteenth century, Spanish measures to prevent the spread of smallpox included isolation, quarantine, and inoculation—which may well have stemmed the spread of several epidemics known to have ravaged Mexico and the Southwest. The very ideas of contagion and infection held different meanings than they would in the following century, and they were not necessarily incompatible. Part of what makes eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury sources so opaque to a modern reader is that the categories that are so meaningful to us—contagious versus noncontagious, infectious versus chronic—were neither crucial nor discrete distinctions in earlier eras. Even when these words were employed, their meanings differed from contemporary usage. Although the most extreme anticontagionists, such as the well-known Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush, suggested that there were but two opposed ways of understanding any given disease, most medical men embraced a more complex position.
For instance, a Spanish directive on smallpox issued to the governor of California in emphasized the need for quarantine. Whereas in meteoratious epidemics, excepting in one or two of them, every case is of atmospheric origin; and, in the exceptionable instances, as in the cholera and to which may be added diphtheria , which is believed to possess the contagious attribute, the great majority of cases manifestly arise, not from the diffusion of its contagious virus, but from the existing meteoratious influence. Certain diseases, notably smallpox and syphilis, were widely held to be transmitted from person to person. Still other diseases such as diphtheria and yellow fever were believed to emanate from environmental causes but were liable to become contagious, depending on the circumstances.
Disease always had many potential sources, both human and nonhuman. Perhaps less obviously, these same writings speak to earlier conceptions of the environment. Different conceptions of illness point to differences in how people have understood the nonhuman world. When viewed from the perspective of health, the nineteenthcentury environment was neither passive nor necessarily benign in its natural state. Consequently, untested landscapes were always physically threatening. This fear of distant and unfamiliar places generated reams of popular advice for would-be settlers and travelers. At the same time, existing medical and scientific practices brought the environmental sources of disease into focus. Interest in the medical effects of certain environments has a very long history, dating at least to the Greek physician Hippocrates and his treatise Airs, Waters, and Places, written in the fifth century B.
Theories of environmental causation gained particular prominence in seventeenthand eighteenth-century Europe. In that period several European intellectuals drew on Hippocratic ideas to articulate a discourse that denigrated warm places and their inhabitants. This view would be widely held in Europe for at least the next century. Only in the s, however, would the pr of essions of medicine and geography scientize these beliefs. For both Europeans and Americans, the project of colonial expansion fostered the new disciplines of medical geography—which studied the large-scale distribution of diseases across continents—and medical topography—which cataloged the physical factors that affected health in certain localities. Medical geography implicitly and of ten explicitly served the needs of European colonialism. Many of the earliest medical topographies emerged from various militaries out of the concern for troop mortality in distant regions, and, not surprisingly, it was British physicians who did the most to systematize the geographic approach to disease.
First published in , the book had reached its sixth edition by , a testament to its influence. It would remain the principal reference on the subject for two more decades as it was expanded and edited by another British colonial physician, James Ranald Martin. For both authors, health was the result of humoral balance in the body, and warm climates were likely to overstimulate the temperate European constitution. Excessive heat, especially temperatures that exceeded that of the body, predisposed an individual to all kinds of diseases. Prevailing medical opinion held that the greatest effect was felt on the liver, which produced irregular secretions until, exhausted, it ceased to function adequately.
The texts themselves were both diagnostic and prescriptive, of fering not only a chronicle of disease and its symptoms but also suggestions on how Europeans might lessen the impacts of hot climates on their selves through rigid temperance and prophylactic measures. In the case of serious illness, however, the best and of ten the only hope lay in returning to a more temperate climate. Especially important to the continental versions of medical geography was the work of Alexander von Humboldt, who is considered the founder of scientific geography.
Humboldt sought to understand the natural world by collecting quantitative information about various landscapes and then seeking mathematical correlations among the variables he had measured. His most significant contribution to physical geography was the isothermal map—a cartographic representation that linked regions by their average temperatures. Humboldt noted that these lines of average temperature, along with altitude, set limits on the occurrence of certain plants, and he produced numerous maps of the world that charted distributions of flora. He also suggested that, like plants, certain diseases were produced under specific conditions of temperature, humidity, and altitude. It was this observation that medical geographers, Germans in particular, took as their starting point. They sought to map the spatial distribution of disease in the same way that Humboldt had mapped the distribution of plants.
Like their mentor, medical geographers looked for correlations between the occurrence of disease and measured characteristics of the landscape. Practitioners held out the hope that with the collection of enough data—temperature, barometric pressure, rainfall, and so on— they would be able to predict the response of human bodies to diverse environmental conditions. Behind the desire to uncover the relationship between bodies and landscape lay the belief that the success of Europeans had always hinged, to some undetermined extent, on climate and, moreover, that climate might ultimately set limits on their continuing colonial ambitions.
Nineteenth-century Europeans and Americans understood race in multiple and contradictory ways—as variously a sign of biology, nationality, and culture. A concept anchored in incoherence, race necessarily eluded precise definition. Yet it was quite clear to contemporaries that race was associated in some way with place. The yellow race originated in Asia, the red in America. Race always had a geographic component, and thus it is hardly surprising that ideas of race played a central role in nineteenth-century medical geography. After all, the question that most interested European medical geographers was whether those of northern European descent i.
While there was general agreement that strange environments had negative effects on European bodies, contemporaries debated the extent to which those same bodies might adapt and acclimatize to their new surroundings. As Europeans had succeeded in introducing plants and animals to unfamiliar regions, they argued, the same would be true for transplanted peoples. But theories of human acclimatization had many opponents. For most who argued against acclimatization, the central issue was racial malleability. If European bodies could in fact physically change to survive in a new climate, would they still be European? More to the point, would they still be white? The question would continue to preoccupy European and American intellectuals for the rest of the century.
The concern with whiteness and its potential malleability was paramount in European settler societies. By definition, frontiers posed challenges to racial identities; their miscegenated populations only underscored the problem. In a period in which place helped to produce ideas of race and bodies were perceived as porous and5permeable, migration always threatened racial identity as well as health. Among the most influential authors on this point was Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who argued that the cold, humid climate of North America could not support plants and animals of the same size and quality as those in Europe.
Pointing to the absence of large native mammals—such as the giraffe, the hippopotamus, and the lion—and to the degeneration of European livestock in the new world, Buffon argued that North America produced neither the same quality of person nor the high level of civilization that existed in Europe. So influential was this thinking among elites that Thomas Jefferson felt compelled to mount a detailed defense of the North American climate and its plant and animal species in his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia. For Jefferson, establishing the existence of the mammoth—a beast larger than any found in Europe—and defending both American livestock and the sexual prowess of Native Americans were crucial to predicting a healthy and fertile white population in America. However, by the nineteenth century whites had proven themselves capable of prospering in both New England and the South.
The regions west of the Mississippi were unfamiliar and relatively untested. Much of the landscape of the West was treeless and arid, in contrast to the humid and well-forested lands of the East. The initial American settlement experience in the Mississippi Valley had not been encouraging for whites, who had sickened and died in large numbers. Blodgett in a massive work on the American climate. Like their European counterparts, Americans feared that the environmental characteristics of new lands might frustrate their desire for expansion. Consequently, knowledge of the relationship between climate and disease became as important as geologic or agricultural assessments to furthering the colonization of western North America, and the period saw several important American contributions to medical geography. In the army surgeon Samuel Forry used data collected by the military to compose the first complete medical geography of the United States. Forry emphasized the need to move from anecdotal accounts of climate and disease to the quantification of climatic features, and his work was widely lauded as an original and important contribution to medical science.
When latitude was considered in isolation, the more southerly location of North America relative to northern Europe was cause for concern. Principal Diseases of the Interior of the Valley of North America as They Appear in the Caucasian, African, Indian, and Esquimaux Varieties of Its Population —54 , drew international attention to the medical geography of North America. In many ways, Drake was an unlikely person to make such a contribution. He was raised on the Kentucky frontier at the turn of the century, far from the centers of medical knowledge. The work was well received, and that publishing success inspired him to undertake an exceedingly ambitious effort to chronicle the diseases of the entire West. Drake embraced as his region of study the area between the Allegheny Mountains in the east and the Rockies in the west and running from the Gulf of Mexico to the Polar Sea.
He was explicitly Humboldtian in his approach, emphasizing the primary importance of latitude and altitude to disease and the local character of both symptoms and cures and insisting that the watershed was the proper unit of medical analysis. All told, Drake spent more than ten years collecting firsthand information and traveled more than thirty thousand miles. When published, his book ran to more than 1, pages. It immediately became a seminal publication in American medicine and inspired much more work along the same lines. That growing interest in medical geography also helped drive an interest in meteorology among American intellectuals, doctors in particular. In the newly formed Smithsonian Institution enlisted physicians across the country to assist in the systematic collection of national weather data.
Lorin Blodget, a former employee of the Smithsonian, would publish much of that work in his page Climatology of the United States , which American physicians embraced as a critical reference. The goal of medical geographers was not to erase local particularity but to quantify and systematize it. It was on the periphery where new and unusual relationships might be uncovered and where existing theories could be tested against new circumstances. Medical geography was a science, but it was a science of local experience. The region of California generated no shortage of medicoenvironmental commentary, and among the most prolific writers were those who most enthusiastically and uncritically advocated settlement: western boosters.
Despite the pr of usion of writers, the tracts themselves have a formulaic quality. Perhaps this is not surprising. Like modern tabloids, booster literature is notoriously unreliable. History and environments alike can too easily be rewritten to further social and political goals, and booster accounts of California were motivated at least as much by desires for American colonization as by empirical observation. And though what they wrote was not necessarily or even likely to be true, they tell us something about prevailing cultural vocabularies: what boosters wrote about presumably held some meaning for their intended readers. Nineteenth-century boosters did not invent the connection between climate and health; they did, however, wield that connection freely, of ten with considerable flair. There is no disease whatever than can be attributed to the influence of the climate. The surgeons of California have remarked that wounds heal here with astonishing rapidity, owing, it is supposed, in a great measure, to the extreme purity of the atmosphere.
Perhaps as many as 90, immigrants arrived in California in a single year, and between and the population rose by almost , Some, such as the physician John Baker who came to California from New Hampshire in , managed to stay relatively healthy and attributed their vigor and success in part to the positive effects of the local climate. But many more wrote of illness and disease. Sickness seemingly surrounded and enveloped miners and travelers in the early s. It is our imperative duty as medical men to correct such error and to disseminate the truth. Disease spread rapidly in the havoc of colonial invasion, though it is difficult if not impossible to assess the material prevalence of disease in contemporary scientific terms.
Moreover, nineteenth-century categories of disease do not correspond neatly to contemporary ones. The most systematic accounts of disease from the period appear in army reports on the health of troops stationed in California ; yet even these reveal more about the cultural gulf that separates the nineteenth from the twenty-first century than about disease as we might now understand it. The reports do contain death rates for the army, and by themselves these do not suggest that troop mortality was especially high in California —at least as compared with the southern United States or the tropical regions of the world. Yet disease in California was acknowledged to be highly localized. In some regions, rates of illness and death rivaled the most disease-ridden sections of the South.
Army surgeons noted that the prevalence of illness, if not death, at certain posts was disturbingly high by any contemporary standard. Camp Far West, located in the Sacramento Valley, was abandoned in on account of its unhealthfulness, and a second fort, established some distance farther north, was similarly abandoned in Death rates calculated for the city in the s are considerably worse than those for the state as a whole: 39 per 1, persons in ; 74 per 1, in , when cholera was at its height; and 27 per 1, in Many diseases were prevalent in early California , and the incidence of disease seemed to be increasing in some regions. Cholera appeared again in , and smallpox struck the state three times in the first two decades of American occupation. Of equal or even greater concern were the various fevers. Insanity had been a local concern since the gold rush, but in the s the State Board of Health noted somewhat anxiously that it might become an epidemic.
Whereas the environment was a critical factor, the characteristics of an individual body were certainly relevant. Even in an unhealthy climate, not everyone succumbed to illness. However, just four months later he was unable to maintain the same sanguine assessment. He listed dysentery, diarrhea, pulmonary disorders, and fevers as the most prevalent diseases. Americans such as Leonard worried that the environmental characteristics of new lands might frustrate their desire for expansion, and mass outbreaks of disease were particularly disillusioning.
Thus to the extent that disease was the result of human action intemperance, poor diet , the health of the community could be restored; accordingly, the prospects for settlement remained good. But to the extent that disease was the outcome of local environmental factors, it was largely outside human control; settlement, in turn, was threatened. The health concerns of nineteenth-century colonizers were inextricably connected to their obsession with race, and American immigrants to California were no exception. White settlers saw themselves as more vulnerable to certain diseases because of their race.
And in an ethnically heterogeneous society such as post—gold rush California , vulnerability to specific diseases such as malaria could itself be a sign of whiteness. At the same moment, the growing crisis over slavery intensified both popular and medical interest in the debate over races and their proper places. These ideas cast human migration—including American expansion—in threatening terms. In the Edinburgh anatomist Robert Knox published his treatise, The Races of Men: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Influence of Race over the Destinies of Nations. race of pure Saxon blood, is a dream which can never be realized. For some, these debates over races and their proper places cast American westward migration in ambiguous if not completely negative terms. For Euro-Americans engaged in Western colonization, the concern with the health of white bodies took on particular urgency.
In California , Euro-American perceptions of Mexican society only served to intensify the question of degeneration. Common, as well as pr of essional, knowledge held that the numbers and characteristics of the local people were important indicators of the quality of the land. that a slothful, squalid-looking population invariably characterizes an unhealthy country. But what the relatively mild climate of California would yield was, in , still unknown. John Baker expressed this mixture of hope and anxiety after he arrived in San Diego in If we found a man from the States on the Isthmus [ of Panama] where there were many they had the appearance of sickness and debility about them. But at San Diego they seemed to be healthy. In , firsthand information about the region was still relatively scarce, and its vast distance from centers of civilization underscored its unknown character. Although the presence of gold made California irresistibly attractive, immigrants had almost no idea what to expect when they arrived.
Moreover, in intellectual circles the rise of Humboldtian geography had cast California in an ambiguous light. Much of California was anomalous in just this way; some localities stood out as exceedingly hot. At the same time, however, Euro-Americans could not help but wonder whether there might be some underlying relationship between the social diversity that they feared and the regional climate. Many immigrant physicians viewed California as an experiment in racial health, and neither the social conditions nor the overall state of health in gold rush California initially inspired white confidence on this point.
Several decades later Euro-Americans still held Indian bodies as proxies for the natural environment. to illustrate its features. Peter Remondino would extol the appearance, longevity, and endurance of the southern California Indians, comparing them to that paragon of physical and moral perfection, the ancient Greeks. Indians presented something of a conundrum in this regard. It was necessary to understand Indians as both physically superior and physically inferior. The answer that many would settle on was to assert, as Dr. so long as he is not subject to the habits of civilized life. Moreover, avoiding racial degeneration depended on the ability of female immigrants to produce able-bodied and unambiguously white children. Manifest destiny hinged not only on conquest and migration but also on reproduction. Reproduction, in turn, depended on female health. Consequently, the diseases of women drew particular attention because of their potential effects on fertility and childbearing.
Thomas Logan appealed to mortality statistics to demonstrate that the proportionate mortality of women in California was lower than that of men. Over time, as white dominance became an established reality in the region, California promoters such as Nordh of f, as well as some of the more boosterish doctors, would turn concerns about degeneration around and claim that the mild climate of the Pacific Coast produced an even healthier breed of white Americans. Peter Remondino, who became one of the foremost boosters of southern California as well as the owner of a popular health resort in San Diego , would pen several articles on climate and health in the s in which he refuted the widely held idea that humidity was bad for health and only harsh climates bred vigor. In contrast, contemporary medicine is not much concerned with the landscape; physicians generally confine themselves to the terrain of the human body, while the natural environment is left to a host of other disciplines.
This narrowing of pr of essional perspective and the intellectual parsing of environmental and medical sciences is largely a product of the early twentieth century. It was only logical that among the early European exploring expeditions, the same person typically served as both doctor and naturalist. Rather, nineteenth-century science underwrote and sustained widely held beliefs that melded human health and the natural environment into an inextricable whole.
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Archive-It Subscription Explore the Collections Learn More Build Collections. Sign up for free Log in. Search metadata Search text contents Search TV news captions Search radio transcripts Search archived web sites Advanced Search. University of California publications in history Item Preview. remove-circle Share or Embed This Item. EMBED for wordpress. com hosted blogs and archive. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Publication date Topics History Publisher Berkeley University of California Press Collection robarts ; toronto Digitizing sponsor University of Toronto Contributor Robarts - University of Toronto Language English Volume 3.
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13/09/ · Cambridge University Press: ad: Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming: Internet Archive There Is No Preview Available For This Item This item does not appear to The University of California Press e-books collection holds books published by UCP (and a select few printed by other academic presses) between The general public currently has Catalogue University of California Press Publications PDF Download Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or 5/04/ · You can see the PDF demo, size of the PDF, page numbers, and direct download PDF of ‘The University of California Press’ using the download button. The University of Batteries of Life | University of California Press - Free download as PDF File .pdf), Text File .txt) or read online for free. x University of California publications in history: University of California (): Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming: Internet Archive University of California publications in ... read more
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civilization do the causes [ of ill health among women] exist or prevail to. Please find all options here. When published, his book ran to more than 1, pages. Discussions of causality, whether carried on by physicians or laypeople, embraced theories of environment and contagion, individual constitution and moral rectitude, personal habits and social progress. Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. What was historically contingent—European dominance in North America— can come to seem biologically predestined, and the centuries-long struggle between native peoples and Euro-Americans, which was marked by university of california press free download pdf violence, can too easily be rewritten as a passive and unavoidable conquest. It was this observation that medical geographers, Germans in particular, took as their starting point.
