Ebook: Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500-1900

It is generally assumed that tropical medicine only emerged as a medical specialism in the late nineteenth century under the aegis of men like Patrick Manson and Ronald Ross. However, recent research (much of it brought together for the first time in this volume) shows that a distinctive medicine of 'warm climates' came into existence much earlier in areas like the West-Indies, Indonesia and India. Europeans' health needs were one imperative, but this was more than just the medicine of Europe shipped overseas. Contact with non-Western medical ideas and practices was also a stimulus, as was Europe's encounter with unfamiliar environments and peoples.