Medicine and International Relations in the Caribbean: Some Historical Variants

Medicine has long framed race-relations in the Carribean-that basin where African and European cultures have encountered each other for centuries. Whether it was Sir Hans Sloane, who as a physician in Jamaica wrote about African medical beliefs and practices in the seventeenth century, or Dr. Leonard Wood, a doctor who served as military governor to Cuba two hundred years later, medicine and its practitioners have played a key role in the perception of the African Other. While it may not be surprising that colonial physicians often failed to acknowledge the same errors in their own Western medical practices as those found in African therapeutics, the natural empathy felt by many practitioners towards their patients nuanced many of the conclusions drawn from their unique cultural encounters.