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

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 were 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 several ways, including creating a distance from Africans and rejecting any bridge or interaction with indigenous healing systems. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the push towards empire-building in Africa, Portuguese authorities became less tolerant regarding indigenous practices and more vigilant regarding the colonial health services. The standards of the Medical School of Goa, which had been left alone for decades, were criticised and revised. As for the native practices, they were repressed or described as exotic curiosities. Yet, at the turn of the century, the project of biomedicine as a tool of empire was hardly a success. Africans kept fearing and fleeing European-style hospitals and colonial medical care. Noting what little impact they had amongst local populations, some Portuguese colonial physicians argued in the 1920s that a viable strategy to reach the natives should adopt some of their customs – or, in other words, hybridise for success. Their suggestions did not become mainstream, as the later theorists of lusotropicalism might welcome; but they can be seen as evidence of the fragility of biomedical power in that context. The other side of that fragility corresponds to the pervasiveness of other systems of healing, whether underground, unacknowledged or acknowledged by the authorities.