Abstract
Throughout the colonial period—particularly in the 19th century–various mental disturbances were identified among Greenlanders. Both the popular view—and that of medical practitioners’—was that these mental disturbances were closely tied to (what was perceived to be) their cultural “capacities”. Their findings may be used as a lens to view the political, economic and epistemological premises of the colonial project. The process of how the medical profession embarked upon the diagnosis reveals much about the colonial process and the physical and emotional challenges faced by Greenlanders. There was indeed an intimate connection between medicine and colonial rule and this chapter presents an analysis of how diagnoses specific to Inuit can be used as a lens to supplement the picture of the colonial project’s political, economic and epistemological premises in Greenland.
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Notes
- 1.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1968).
- 2.
Fanon, Black Skin.
- 3.
Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 8.
- 4.
David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1993), 7–8.
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Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 8.
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Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 8.
- 7.
Arnold, Colonizing the Body, 9. Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 127, takes a similar interest in the role of colonial medicine in India. However, Prakash importantly notes that the colonial situation prevented the British from governing the Indians as modern subjects (Prakash, Another Reason, 143.). The colonial setting was, according to Prakash, characterized by the “unavailability of capillary forms of power,” and the British were obliged to introduce sanitary regulations, campaigns, and western medical therapeutics and institutions as acts of colonial rule (Prakash, Another Reason, 127). For Prakash, the specific nature of colonial governance in India provided the colonial elite with an opportunity to establish contending strategies (Prakash, Another Reason, 127). The way in which the field of medicine was a site for power as well as resistance has, thus, been a recurrent theme within the field.
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Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 106.
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Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel, and Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 117.
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Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, 116.
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See, for example, Alfred Bertelsen, “Om fødslerne i Grønland og de seksuelle forhold sammesteds,” Særtryk af Bibliotek for Læger, VII række (1907); Alfred Bertelsen, “Ældre og nyere Tids Fødselshjælp i Grønland,” Tidsskrift for Jordemødre 11, 21 (1910); Alfred Bertelsen, “Om Dødeligheden i Grønland og om nogle Dødsaarsagerne sammesteds,” Bibliotek for læger 102 (1910); Gustav Meldorf, “Fra en Vaccinationsrejse i Egnen omkring Kap Farvel i 1900,” Meddelelser om Grønland 25 (1902); Gustav Meldorf, ”Tubekulosens Udbredelse i Grønland,” Meddelelser om Grønland 26 (1903); Gustav Meldorf, “Sociale og hygiejniske Forhold i Grønland,” Bibliotek for Læger 8, 5 (1904); Gustav Meldorf, “Klimaets Indflydelse paa Sundhedsforholdene m. m. i Grønland,” De danske Atlanterhavsøer vol. 3 (København, 1904–1906); Gustav Meldorf, “Den grønlandske Befolknings Huse og deres Udvikling,” Grønlandske Selskabs Aarskrift (1909).
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The number of doctors grew: in 1905–1906 to five and in 1926 to seven. Mette Rønsager, Udviklingen i Grønlændernes sundheds- og sygdomsopfattelse i Vestgrønland som følge af mødet med det vestlige sundhedsvæsen i perioden ca. 1800 til ca. 1930, med læge Alfred Bertelsen som hovedkilde (København: Institut for Eskimologi, Det Humanistiske Fakultet, Københavns Universitet, 2001).
- 13.
The field of historical research into medicine in Greenland is not overwhelmingly large. Recent research includes eskimologist Mette Rønsager’s work on the medical profession in Greenland and her extensive investigation into midwifery in Greenland in the period. Rønsager concludes that midwives embodied a significant position as agents of western medical knowledge and civilization that exceeded the field of (western) midwifery in several ways. As the sole representative of the medical system in many isolated communities, Greenlandic midwives—positioned as they were between Greenlandic tradition and western culture—became brokers between the colonial apparatus and the colonized population. Mette Rønsager, Imellem læger. og landsmænd. Den vestgrønlandske jordemoderinstitution 1820–1920 (Ph.D. dissertation, Copenhagen: Eskimology and Arctic Studies/Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, 2006), 207–210.
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Sniff Andersen Nexø, “Undesired Contacts. The Troubled Boundaries of Colonial Bodies in Greenland,” Ethnologia Scandinavica 42 (2012).
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Inge Lynge, “Mental Disorders in Greenland. Past and Present,” Meddelelser om Grønland 21 (1997).
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Lynge, “Mental Disorders in Greenland,” 17–20.
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Lynge, “Mental Disorders in Greenland,” 21.
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Lynge, “Mental Disorders in Greenland,” 20–22.
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R. E. Peary, The North Pole. Its Discovery in 1909 Under the Auspices of the Peary Arctic Club (New York: Greenwood Press Publishers, 1910).
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A. A. Brill, “Piblockto or Hysteria Among Peary’s Eskimos,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 40 (1913).
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Lyle Dick “‘Pibloktoq’ (Arctic Hysteria): A Construction of European-Inuit Relations?” Arctic Anthropology 32, 2 (1995).
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Lynge, “Mental Disorders in Greenland,” 18.
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Lynge, “Mental Disorders in Greenland,” 18.
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Alfred Bertelsen, “Grønlands Medicinsk Statistik og Nosografi, III Det sædvanlige grønlandske sygdomsbillede,” Meddelelser om Grønland 117, 2 (1940), 177–180.
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Carl Lange, “Bemærkninger om Grønlands Sygdomsforhold,” Bibliotek for Læger, Række: 8 (1864): 53–54.
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Alfred Bertelsen, “Neuro-patologiske Meddelelser fra Grønland,” Bibliotek for Læger 8, 6 (1905).
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Bertelsen, “Neuro-patologiske,” 121–122.
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Ivan Lind Christensen and Søren Rud, “Arctic Neurasthenia—The Case of Greenlandic Kayak Fear 1864–1940,” Social History of Medicine (2013).
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Hansen, “Kajaksvimmelhed,” 56–60.
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Hansen, “Kajaksvimmelhed,” 59–60.
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Lange, “Bemærkninger om.”
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V. Haven, “Nosografiske Bemærkninger om Grønland,” Ugeskrift for Læger 4, 13 (1882): 190.
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Gustav Meldorf, “Om Kajaksvimmelheden i Grønland og dens Forhold til Brugen af Nydelsesmidler,” Bibliotek for Læger 8, 1 (1900).
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Meldorf, “Om Kajaksvimmelheden.”
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Meldorf, “Om Kajaksvimmelheden.”
- 37.
Meldorf, “Om Kajaksvimmelheden,” 525–527.
- 38.
Meldorf, “Om Kajaksvimmelheden,” 537–538.
- 39.
See, for example, Wilhelm Munck, Om de fattiges vilkaar paa Christianhavn (Kjøbenhavn: Den Gyldendalske Boghandel (F. Hegel), 1867); J. C. Holck, Om Godgjørenhed og frivilligt Fattigvæsen (Kjøbenhavn: V. Thanning & Appel, 1869).
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Knud Pontoppidan, Psychiatriske forelæsninger og studier (Th. Lind, 1892).
- 41.
Knud Pontoppidan, “Om den grønlandske Kajaksvimmelhed,” Bibliotek for Læger 8 (1901).
- 42.
Bertelsen, “Neuro-patologiske.”
- 43.
Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter, eds., Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First World War (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001).
- 44.
Gijswijt-Hofstra and Porter, Cultures of Neurasthenia, 2.
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Brad Campbell, “The Making of ‘American’: Race and Nation in Neurasthenic Discourse,” History of Psychiatry 18, 2 (2007).
- 46.
Campbell, “The Making of,” 162.
- 47.
Charles E. Woodroff, The Effects of Tropical Light on White Men (New York/London: Rebman, 1905).
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Knud Pontoppidan, “Neurasthenien: bidrag til skildringen af vor tids nervositet” (T. H. Lind, 1886), 1.
- 49.
Bertelsen, “Neuro-patologiske.”
- 50.
Bertelsen, “Neuro-patologiske,” 325.
- 51.
Bertelsen, “Neuro-patologiske,” 326.
- 52.
Warwick Anderson, “The Trespass speaks: White Masculinity and colonial breakdown.” The American Historical Review 102, 5 (1997), 1344.
- 53.
Pontoppidan, “Neurasthenien,” 7.
- 54.
Pontoppidan, “Neurasthenien,” 1–2.
- 55.
Pontoppidan, “Neurasthenien,” 6.
- 56.
Dane Kennedy has proposed that the diagnosis proved to be a useful tool in the intersection between the domains of medical science and colonial power: first, it supported the doctors’ claim to expertise by providing them, and the patients, with an explanation for various symptoms; second, it gave scientific credibility to established understandings of the fundamental difference between colonizers and colonized and, finally, it lifted the phenomenon from the individual level to the societal level—thereby relieving the individual sufferer of responsibility. “Diagnosing the Colonial Dilemma: Tropical Neurasthenia and the Alienated Briton,” in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy, eds., Decentring Empire (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2006).
- 57.
Recently Anna Crozier, focusing on British East Africa, has argued that even though tropical neurasthenia was closely linked to colonial hierarchies, it had more similarities with the metropolitan model of neurasthenia than both Anderson’s and Kennedy’s accounts allow for. Furthermore, Crozier proposes that the diagnosis, in the case of British East Africa, was utilized as a powerful management tool by the colonial administration. Screening for signs of neurasthenia in the hiring process of young men as colonial carriers gave the administration officers a tool that secured selection of the fit and ardent. Furthermore, the label of tropical neurasthenia provided the authorities with a medical reason to send unwanted personnel home. Anna Crozier, “What Was Tropical About Tropical Neurasthenia? The Utility of the Diagnosis in the Management of British East Africa,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 64, 4 (2009).
- 58.
Nathan Porath, “The Naturalization of Psychiatry in Indonesia and Its Interaction with Indigenous Therapeutics,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 164, 4 (2008).
- 59.
Arktisk Institut, Copenhagen, Arkivfond A 308, item no. 1.
- 60.
Bertelsen, “Neuro-patologiske Meddelelser.”
- 61.
Bertelsen, “Grønlands Medicinsk Statistik,” 180.
- 62.
Bertelsen, “Grønlands Medicinsk Statistik,” 176.
- 63.
Bertelsen, “Grønlands Medicinsk Statistik,” 186.
- 64.
Anderson, “The trespass speaks,” 1368.
- 65.
Dipesh Chakrabarty has coined this situation, by suggesting that colonized and former colonized people have been assigned a place in the imaginary waiting room of history—while the (former) colonizers remain reluctant to make any movement toward leveling out the perceived cultural differences. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8.
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Rud, S. (2017). Diagnosing Vulnerability. In: Colonialism in Greenland. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46158-8_5
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