Coming ‘Home’ to (post)Colonial Medicine: Treating Tropical Bodies in Post-War Britain

While investment and popular enthusiasm have fuelled significant growth in the history of medicine since the 1980s, it remains by some metrics well outside of the historical mainstream. Yet developments in the history of medicine could offer traction to historians more generally. Through its close critical attention to power, embodiment and hegemonic institutions and knowledges, the history of medicine also presents a unique perspective from which to interrogate ‘postcolonialism’. Here, post-war British examples demonstrate the potential of a medical and postcolonial lens for historians exploring policy making, immigration or identity. In this period, civil servants, biomedical researchers, policy makers, and publics including migrants actively shaped medical and governmental responses to an apparently novel phenomenon: the mass migration to Britain of its former tropical subjects. Postcolonial analysis uncovers new models of community, and highlights the importance of the late twentieth-century and the post-imperial city as sites of historiographic and theoretical development.