Medical Hybridisms and Social Boundaries: Aspects of Portuguese Colonialism in Africa and India in the Nineteenth Century.

Abstract

This article addresses different modes of interaction between medical systems, beliefs and practices under Portuguese colonialism in Asia and Africa. I will argue that there were mutual borrowings for practical healing purposes until at least the 1880s. Prior to that, biomedicine in the Portuguese colonies was incipient, and attempts to promote its expansion had a very limited impact. That is also valid for Goa, India, in spite of the existence of a western-style Medical School since the 1840s. While its students wee formally exposed to biomedicine alone, they interacted and were familiar with other systems of understanding illness and healing. Some of the Medical School graduates served in the African colonies in paradoxical circumstances. They had little support as agents of the imperial administration, with poor training, low wages, and secondary roles. And yet they had assigned themselves a role in the imperial project on the side of the colonisers, something they emphasised in...