Race, Specificity, and Statistics in Victorian Medicine
Suman Seth
Abstract This paper focuses on Edmund Parkes’ Manual of Practical Hygiene, Prepared Especially for Use in the Medical Service Army (1864), a text that would become standard within British military medicine decades to come. Within Manual, I argue, we can see confluence three streams thinking – each beginning 1830s and 1840s led new orthodoxy race-medicine Victorian period. The first flowed from an ‘avalanche numbers’, use Hacking’s phrase, concerning medical statistics, set seemingly objective data made race medically ‘real’ form had not been evident before. second was solidification fixist conceptions after collapse what George Stocking called ‘Prichardian paradigm’ ethnology. third involved has known, history medicine, as ‘doctrine specific etiology’, idea cause certain diseases those alone. These factors together novel racial arguments, one assumed reality permanence explained differences susceptibility immunity not, common earlier, terms climatic habituation, but rather fixity peculiarity internal differences.
Journal of Victorian Culture