This essay compares two relatively recent works of intellectual history centred on the 18th century, both with an ambitious scope, and both written by established historians of science and medicine: Stephen Gaukroger’s The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739-1841 and Suman Seth’s Difference and Disease: medicine, race, and the eighteenth-century British empire. The Natural and the Human (Oxford 2016) is the third book in a series of four volumes, titled Science and the Shaping of Modernity, which examines the rise of science in Europe and how it became central to Western culture. The first two volumes are The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, 1210-1685 (Oxford 2006) and The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility, 1680-1760 (Oxford 2010). The fourth and final volume is Civilization and the Culture of Science, 1795-1935 (Oxford 2022).1 The Natural and the Human covers transformations in the natural and human sciences between two guiding scientific paradigms: the mechanistic world of the 17th century and the technologically driven world of the 19th century.
Suman Seth’s monograph Difference and Disease (Cambridge 2018) has a narrower and more empirical aim, while keeping a broad scope. Seth analyses how physicians used and in turn influenced European ideas on race in the context of the tropical colonies of the British Empire, especially the territories called the West Indies. Seth focuses particularly on the emergence of the idea that different diseases belong in different geographical spaces and bodies. In a sense, the transformations in 18th-century scholarly thought on the “human” examined by Gaukroger form the intellectual backdrop of Seth’s project. Conversely, Seth’s book provides a more empirical ground on which to “test” the narratives put forward by Gaukroger.
This essay connects Seth’s monograph to Gaukroger’s project, focusing on chapters 3 and 5 of The Natural and the Human, respectively on anthropological medicine and the natural history of man. These two chapters bring Seth’s and Gaukroger’s works closest together. Comparing these two books shows what Gaukroger and Seth can teach historians about the development of the modern human and medical sciences in relation to changing ideas about the human species. Their comparison also highlights what intellectual histories miss by ignoring the political and cultural dynamics surrounding the works of European scholars, especially those dynamics concerning colonial spaces and actors. The essay underlines enduring issues in the assumptions of intellectual histories of science and medicine, even those that reject a more traditional, decontextualised and depoliticised history of ideas. Seth’s and Gaukroger’s books point to an uneasy relationship between intellectual history and a more inclusive, postcolonial, and context-laden version of it.
The naturalisation of the human
Gaukroger’s book sets out to answer a big question with a big argument. At the beginning of the 18th century, Gaukroger states, the guiding paradigm of early modern science – mechanism – had almost collapsed. Mechanism relied on the reductionist idea that micro-particle motion could explain macro-phenomena. But by the end of the 17th century, it became clear that several phenomena, such as gravity, could not be made sense of in reductionist terms. With the demise of mechanism, Gaukroger asks why science did not lose its centrality but instead gained pride in European society. He argues that a new scientific culture emerged in the 18th century, transforming and buttressing the scientific enterprise. This new culture was brought about by the emergence of the human or moral sciences.2
According to Gaukroger, the human sciences changed the relationship that human beings had with the natural world. These sciences placed humans in a more central position relative to scientific inquiry. This happened through a process he calls the “naturalization” of the human: “the formulation in empirical terms of questions about the human realm that had up to that point taken a non-empirical form.”3 Gaukroger identifies five intellectual strands where this naturalisation took place: anthropological medicine, philosophical anthropology, the natural history of man, social arithmetic, and religion, each the subject of a separate chapter.
Seth’s book, like Gaukroger’s, is concerned with the emergence of intellectual views on human beings in the 18th century, although Seth approaches this topic from a medical history angle. Difference and Disease addresses a set of questions concerning medical understandings of tropical diseases: when and why did the diseases of tropical climates become seen as different in kind from those of the temperate areas, and how did this change relate to claims to medical expertise and understandings of race?4 Difference and Disease allows us to see up close an empirical form of investigation of the human being, to use Gaukroger’ formulation. This empirical investigation concerns how medical practitioners who, at least for parts of their lives, lived and worked in colonial spaces such as the West Indies, came to understand differences between diseases and between human bodies. There are, however, some crucial differences in the way Gaukroger and Seth describe such forms of “naturalisation.”
Race-science and race-medicine
Chapter 5 of Gaukroger’s book examines how European scholars, especially from the mid-18th century, studied and understood differences within the human species. At that time, geological observations were pushing the age of the Earth back in time. It became apparent to scholars that the origins of the Earth lay way further back than the biblical chronology would have it, and that unearthed fossils and bones represented extinct species. To understand how these ancient animals related to existing species, scholars used a comparative method. The new discipline of comparative anatomy became crucial not only for investigations relating to animals, but also for a naturalised form of investigation into the human being, which Gaukroger calls the “natural history of man.” According to Gaukroger, this natural history of man did not proceed, as older types of investigation into the human being, “by locating it [the human being] in a medical context.” Instead, it explored continuities between the human species and other animals and between different “types” within the human species.5
The first difference between Seth’s and Gaukroger’s views surfaces in Gaukroger’s assertion that the natural history of man did not have to do with medicine. Seth’s analysis shows, instead, that scholars active in the tradition of the natural history of man also engaged with medical theories. For example, Seth describes how the Comte de Buffon discussed “fluid theory,” the idea that black blood or bile gave its colour to certain groups of people. This theory had been put forward by people such as the anatomist Marcello Malpighi, the traveller François Bernier, and the physicians Alexis Littré and Pierre Barrère. In turn, Buffon’s opinions on the effect of climate on bodies came to form the “orthodox” position for the rest of the century, providing a backdrop to scholarly and medical thought.6
As Seth notes, most historical work that has paid attention to ideas of race has focused on race science, understood mainly as biology and ethnology. By contrast, Seth argues, the relationship between race and medicine is often left understudied.7 Seth chooses to trace the history of “race-medicine,” investigating when and how medical men began to view race as a cause of certain diseases and when racial categories emerged as fixed physical attributes in medical research.
This choice has important consequences, especially as it allows Seth to draw out not just the connections but also the differences between race-science and race-medicine. He remarks that scholars involved in natural philosophy and natural history, such as Voltaire, were prone to seeing fixed differences between “races.” By contrast, medical authors from the first decades of the 18th century had not yet formulated the idea that race could cause different diseases, which would have implied the existence of stark differences between humans.8 These medical men followed Hippocrates’ idea that different places, with their respective “airs” and “waters,” produce different diseases, implying that human bodies were flexible and adaptable rather than having fixed attributes.
Taking into account race-medicine as well as race-science has important consequences when describing the views of historical actors. For example, Seth mentions John Arbuthnot, a Scottish physician, to illustrate the “Hippocratic” approach to disease. Arbuthnot claimed that human “Complexion” depended on the “Air” and that, given a few years in a new environment, a “Race” could acquire the characteristics associated with that environment, even when it came to “Temper and Genius.”9 Gaukroger also cites Arbuthnot. But, in The Natural and the Human, Arbuthnot appears as a climatic theorist who made the “most radical claim” that linguistic and mental abilities depended on the climate.10 Gaukroger does not mention that Arbuthnot believed these differences were flexible. This omission gives an entirely different picture of this physician’s position on human differences.
This contrast in the interpretation of Arbuthnot’s thought makes sense when noting that Gaukroger treats this author as part of the intellectual tradition of the natural history of man. For Gaukroger, Arbuthnot was a simple predecessor of Montesquieu’s more famous climatic theory. He does not mention that Arbuthnot was a physician. By overlooking the medical background of scholars such as Arbuthnot, Gaukroger cannot see, as Seth does, that there was a difference in thought between medical men and their colleagues closer to the natural history or philosophical traditions. As Seth writes, while race was beginning to work as a cause for some race-science authors, including Voltaire and Hume, a Hippocratic environmentalism persisted after the 1720s in the writings of medical authors.11
Colonial spaces
Besides the lens through which they view their actors, there is also a more fundamental reason Gaukroger and Seth diverge in their interpretation of 18th-century thought on human differences. Gaukroger only studies European scholars, while Seth focuses on metropolitan and colonial spaces. As Seth writes, the importance of medicine for race science becomes particularly clear when looking at colonial spaces. While the men of science working in European capitals had little contact with different “races” besides skulls and skeletons, the medical authors living, working, or passing through the colonies interacted with the people and the diseases they tried to understand. In Seth’s words: “Insofar, I would argue, as we are interested in the way naturalistic understandings of race did work – not just intellectual work, but social and political work – then I think we have been looking in the wrong places. The right place – the place that we can see race in action – is medicine in the colonies.”12
This is perhaps the instance in which Seth’s and Gaukroger’s approaches are most at odds. Gaukroger does not appear to be interested in the social and political work performed by understandings of race. He does not consider how the intellectual endeavours he describes were entangled in colonial history or in forming categories of difference. In chapter 3, for example, Gaukroger examines the tradition he calls “anthropological medicine.” This French medical reform movement aimed to take care of all – physical, social and moral – aspects of man’s well-being. Gaukroger states that this reform movement’s central question was, “How might one acquire socially desirable temperaments?”13 Medical men such as Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis viewed humans as malleable in their temperaments and cited the influence of climate in shaping human bodies and habits. As Gaukroger points out, this view on the malleability and perfectibility of man could be taken as an early form of eugenic thinking, yet he does not go further than this remark.
Gaukroger also notes that authors were concerned with the effects of excessive stimulation on the human body and that such authors considered women and men to have different sensitivities, without expanding on the racial and gendered hierarchies that this paradigm implies. Seth, instead, reminds his readers that some authors used sensitivity as a criterion to differentiate between white and black bodies. These authors, such as the plantation owner Edward Long, claimed that African women did not feel the pain of childbirth, which could imply that black people did not descend from Eve and Adam (the two being responsible for the original sin that had led humans to live in pain). Even without polygenist implications, claims about black women’s ease in delivering children reinforced the idea that non-white women were less civilised.14
There is, in principle, no issue with an analysis focused solely on the European intellectual world. However, from the moment an author describes the emergence of empirical inquiries about human beings and engages with questions about human differences, not situating these inquiries in the social and political world of the time results in a rather flat historical account. Gaukroger shows us a succession of scholars responding to each other on questions including how to classify the human species, what connects apes to humans, or how to establish a hierarchy between populations. In his portrayal, these authors are seemingly disconnected from developments such as the institution and fall of slavery or the expansion of colonial empires. Yet, several historians of science and medicine have demonstrated that European thought on human hierarchies was very much linked to developments in the colonial world. Silvia Sebastiani, for example, noted that the apes that were studied and used to understand the human species arrived in Europe via the same networks as the slave trade.15
Again, it is essential to analyse how different historians treat the same historical actors. When discussing how scholars drew boundaries between animals and humans, Gaukroger mentions the Scottish philosopher James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, who compared the behaviour and intelligence of feral children to that of the “orangutan” (a term used to refer to what we would now call the great apes or the chimpanzee). As Gaukroger mentions, Monboddo argued that orangutans had human capacities.16 In her work on Monboddo, Sebastiani describes this same argument but further analyses the repercussions of Monboddo’s position. Sebastiani explains that Monboddo’s insistence on erasing the difference between the orangutan and the human species had another effect. It separated the human species into “lower” echelons (according to Monboddo, black people who were supposedly closer to the orangutan) and “higher” echelons (Europeans).17 Claims that the orangutan mated with black women also reaffirmed this hierarchy. Gaukroger’s analysis reveals a gap in understanding how intellectual views on human beings were both informed by and had consequences for the hierarchies scholars saw in the human species.
By contrast, Seth asserts from the beginning that his project is intellectual history understood not as a “context-free history of ideas, but rather a profoundly context-laden history of arguments.”18 This approach is evident in the closing sections of Difference and Disease, where Seth shows how conceptions of rigid racial differences emerged at the end of the 18th century. Medicine, Seth argues, played a role in hardening concepts of race, particularly through debates on the slave trade. As criticism grew on the inhuman treatment of enslaved people, plantation owners and pro-slavery authors defended themselves by arguing that black people were physically different from whites. In their view, enslaved people were supposedly not afflicted by the same diseases and therefore did not need the same medical care as white people. Other pro-slavery actors attempted to argue that the enslaved received appropriate care, which led them to examine the diseases of the enslaved more closely. This second view, which Seth describes as less “heterodox” than the first one, subtly refocused the debate on differences in diet, customs, and housing between white and black bodies.19 Medical thought and racialised forms of difference were clearly, if not straightforwardly, intertwined. The context of the slave trade is, for Seth, indispensable to tracing the history of 18th century medical thought on human difference.
Unpacking context
What qualifies as “context” is an open question. By showing how European scholars agreed or disagreed with each other across languages, countries, and generations, Gaukroger does help the reader to situate arguments and methods in the context of fervid European intellectual exchanges and political developments. Each chapter illustrates the author’s impressive breadth of learning, carefully describing the thought of crucial philosophers, including Locke, Kant, and Montesquieu, without neglecting lesser-known scholars writing in English, French, German and Italian. Gaukroger does not always leave political context aside. In Chapter 3, he recounts how the French Revolution dismantled the pre-revolutionary structure of medical authority and weakened the Church’s authority. This created a vacuum where the so-called médecins philosophes, physician philosophers, such as Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, could assert their authority. The programme of anthropological medicine, with its revendication that medicine could and should take care of all aspects of a person, including the soul, benefited from this new context. This changed again, Gaukroger notes, with the establishment of the Directory and the Consulate,20 when the Catholic Church regained some of its authority. Parallel developments, such as the popularity and eventual downfall of mesmerism,21 also undermined the claims of the médecins philosophes regarding their holistic approach to the person. Gaukroger does not a priori exclude the effects of political upheavals and institutional changes on intellectual history. He only includes them when they correspond to crucial European developments.
In contrast to Gaukroger’s account, Seth’s book suffers from its monolingualism. Besides a few exceptions, all sources examined by Seth are in English. Seth’s explanation for his focus on British sources is rather laconic. He mentions that British authors often cited other British authors, and that one 18th-century Dutch essay asserted that British physicians were more experienced than others in treating diseases of the West Indies. According to French historian Claude-Olivier Doron, Seth’s linguistic limitation gives only a partial picture of the medical developments he describes.22 In chapter 4, for example, Seth describes the “putrefactive paradigm.” This 18th-century theory of disease assumed pathologies were caused by an internal putrefaction of the humours, a condition which could be cured using antiseptics such as citrus juice. Because putrefactive diseases occurred in warm climates and at sea, the putrefactive paradigm became associated with imperial locations, including ships and tropical colonies. Seth views the putrefactive paradigm as a first step towards the idea that tropical diseases differ from temperate zone diseases. In Doron’s opinion, however, Seth ignores earlier discussions on the corruptive effect of European marshlands, which used to cover large areas of the continent. In this way, his description of the putrefactive paradigm exaggerates the opposition between the “periphery,” meaning colonial locations, and the “centre,” meaning European metropoles.
Doron also doubts Seth’s assertion that before the 18th century, there was almost no discussion on bodies coming from warm climates. This discussion likely existed already, Doron states, only not in British sources. As Doron remarks in the final paragraph of his review: “Can one really put forward a ‘postcolonial history of colonial medicine’ without any consideration for sources written in other languages than English, nor any reference to non-Anglophone secondary sources, and neither a study of archival sources?”23 There is no need to answer this provocation to understand Doron’s point. Including colonial spaces in one’s analysis might not be enough to produce a “profoundly context-laden history of arguments,” to use Seth’s description of his work.
Theory and practice
Beyond language, the authorship and the type of sources examined by Gaukroger and Seth also affect their intellectual histories. Both authors base their research on published texts: philosophy and natural history treatises, especially for Gaukroger, and medical books and articles for Seth. Gaukroger does not reflect on this choice: in his framing, it seems, intellectual history is necessarily traced through the published writings of great scholars, who end up being European and educated men. Seth does reflect on the limitations of his choice of sources, but perhaps without letting this reflection change the deeper assumptions of his research.
Seth acknowledges that looking at published medical texts leads him to focus on relatively educated men who lived in Britain for a significant part of their lives or were part of the community of British colonisers elsewhere in the world. He explains the absence of women and non-European practitioners in his book by stating that he decided to focus on the theories behind certain diseases rather than on the practices of their treatment. He adds that it is precisely in theories of disease that British scholars and physicians emphasised their expertise while downplaying or ignoring that of their non-European colleagues.24 This statement assumes that theory is contained in published texts, which tend to be written by the category of people Seth focused on, meaning educated European men.
The other side of this assumption, which appears to be shared by both Gaukroger and Seth, is that more marginal social groups in the 18th century, such as women and non-Europeans, were producers of practices, and that they inevitably have less of a place or no place at all in intellectual histories. Other historians have, however, turned this idea upside-down. In his 2006 book, To Exercise Our Talents. The Democratization of Writing in Britain, Chris Hilliard studied the literary production of ordinary people as one would study intellectual texts, reconstructing the social circles, publishing venues, and literary ambitions of aspiring British writers from the lower and middle classes.25 The 18th-century British colonies were doubtlessly less democratic and less rich in written sources than the early 20th-century Britain investigated by Hilliard. Nevertheless, it would have been interesting to see what would have happened had Seth suspended his assumptions about which actors produce theories and which produce practices. According to Seth’s own words in the introduction of Difference and Disease, British physicians did not often talk about the activities of local medical practitioners, but it did happen.26 Could Seth have recovered some of the theoretical system of local practitioners by analysing British physicians’ descriptions of these practitioners?
Conclusion
Taken together, Gaukroger’s and Seth’s books are helpful to historians of science and medicine in making valuable points on the entanglement of science with historical perspectives on human beings. Gaukroger shows how the human sciences emerged from a dialogue between 18th-century European intellectuals working in different national and philosophical traditions, as those scholars began to ask empirical questions about humans. Seth shows how medical theories on human bodies and diseases, developed through interaction with colonial spaces, were crucial in construing the categories of difference that Europeans relied on for a long time and that still populate the present.
These two books also illustrate different approaches to intellectual history, specifically in how the authors decide to exclude or include the social and political context of the ideas they describe. In 2002, the historian of political thought Quentin Skinner remarked that studying what someone says, without studying what this does in the world, produces incomplete stories. Two decades after Skinner’s warning, it seems grand histories of ideas such as Gaukroger’s still easily bypass the doing.27 At first glance, Seth’s project of writing a “context-laden history of arguments” seems to take up Skinner’s challenge. Seth demonstrates how the writings of physicians working in British colonies must be understood in the context of the institution and fall of plantation slavery. However, Seth’s attempt to go beyond the “European metropole” with only published English sources at his disposal puts his research at risk of conflating European medicine with an Anglophone educated context. In addition, starting out with an implicit boundary between theory and practice, between saying and doing, and, in turn, between who says and who does, ends up curtailing his ambition.
Positing the existence of a realm of theory, thought, or writing, lies at the very core of the history of ideas. This very starting point seems to get in the way of those wanting to write a postcolonial history of science and medicine. Seth does not fully depart from a view of intellectual history as a study of theory distinguished from practice, and as a study of educated writers distinguished from the rest of society. From the perspective of postcolonial history, letting go of these assumptions would probably have benefitted Seth’s project. Among other things, it would have allowed him to pay more attention to indigenous medical practitioners. But if he had let go, it might have effectively meant giving up on doing intellectual history for how we know it. There seems to be an irreconcilable tension between intellectual and postcolonial history, perhaps because a truly contextualised history of ideas would stop being a history of ideas altogether.
Edited by Luca Forgiarini and Mor Lumbroso
- Sadly, Stephen Gaukroger passed away shortly after the publication of this last volume, in September 2023. ↩︎
- Stephen Gaukroger, ‘Introduction’, in Civilization and the Culture of Science: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1795-1935, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Oxford University Press, 2020), 0, https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198849070.003.0001. ↩︎
- Stephen Gaukroger, The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739-1841 (Oxford University Press, 2016), 9. ↩︎
- Suman Seth, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018), 3–4. ↩︎
- Gaukroger, The Natural and the Human, 228. ↩︎
- Seth, 175–76. ↩︎
- Seth, Difference and Disease, 170–73. ↩︎
- Seth, 196. ↩︎
- Seth, 195. ↩︎
- Gaukroger, The Natural and the Human, 253. ↩︎
- Seth, Difference and Disease, 196. ↩︎
- Seth, 173. ↩︎
- Gaukroger, The Natural and the Human, 152. ↩︎
- Seth, Difference and Disease, 181–82. ↩︎
- Silvia Sebastiani, ‘A “Monster with Human Visage”: The Orangutan, Savagery, and the Borders of Humanity in the Global Enlightenment’, History of the Human Sciences 32, no. 4 (1 October 2019): 82, https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695119836619. ↩︎
- Gaukroger, The Natural and the Human, 234. ↩︎
- Sebastiani, ‘A “Monster with Human Visage”’, 92. ↩︎
- Seth, Difference and Disease, 13. ↩︎
- Seth, Chapter 7 (241-276). ↩︎
- The Directory was a governing body established in 1795 and consisting of five members. In 1799, it was overthrown by Napoleon and supplanted by the Consulate, a three-member government during which Napoleon consolidated his power as ruler of France. ↩︎
- Mesmerism was a theory by Franz Mesmer based on the idea that one could manipulate a vital force flowing inside all living beings. The theory attracted great attention but was criticised by scholars and eventually dismissed. ↩︎
- Claude-Olivier Doron, ‘Suman Seth, Difference and Disease. Medicine, Race and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire’, Histoire, médecine et santé, no. 21 (17 August 2022): 2211–26, https://doi.org/10.4000/hms.5985. ↩︎
- Doron, 8. ↩︎
- Seth, Difference and Disease, 13–14. ↩︎
- Christopher Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (Harvard University Press, 2009), https://doi.org/10.4159/9780674038653. ↩︎
- Doron, ‘Suman Seth, Difference and Disease. Medicine, Race and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire’, 14. ↩︎
- Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 79. ↩︎