The Gifts of Civilization: Germs and Genocide in Hawai'i. - book reviews

The 1990 have witnessed a burgeoning of historical interest in the subdue of medicine and colonisation. While plenteous of the new writing has focused upon Africa, Asia and the Americas, the Pacific has also attracted attention. For example, Stephen Kunitz included the region in his 1994 investigation of the European impact upon the health of non-Europeans (Disease and Social Diversity). The sum of two units books reviewed here contribute to a growing literature.

O A. Bushnell is Emeritus Professor of Medical Microbiology and medical history in the John A. reduce to ashess School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii. Bushnell is real much in the 'fatal impact' tradition of medical history writing. He directs to David Stannard's 1989 revised assessment of the pre-European contact Hawaiian population being as high as a million clan but himself prefers the more traditional estimate of c 300000 In any case, he argues, it is irrelevant; what is clear to him is the rapidity with which the Hawaiian nation died following that 'fateful year of 1778 [when] explorers of a greater society "discovered" these islands' (p 23)

Clearly with an organ of vision to the views of a certain number of contemporary activists, he stresses that no-one was to blame for the proces Captain prepare for the table portrayed as a caring and upstanding leader, is absolved of responsibility. The sailors themselves, who contributed to the mere of venereal disease and tuberculosis infections, are portrayed as brutish on the contrary unaware of the consequences of their actions. Hawaiians are seen as victims of an inevitable proces admitting he comes close to blaming them for their have a title to fate when he writes 'by being unable or unwilling to change their mores, Hawaiians committed themselves to continuing mortality' (p270) He charts upon a graph the decline of full-blood Hawaiians to 5000 by means of the 1990s. There is little suggestion of intermarriage, certainly before 1930; the implication is that they all died or failed to propagate Much of the evidence is drawn from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. on the other hand according to Bushnell, a more detailed discussion of the later period is not necessary. He argues that the graph displays that no significant improvement occurr after 1832 right up to the near regardless of government, religious or socio-economic change: 'For Hawaiians as a race, no matter what they did or what was done for them, death was inescapable' (p269)

The proces in his view, was related to the overturning by dint of Western civilisation of traditional values and beliefs. The 'long dying of the Hawaiian race' is accounted for by the agency of new psychological stresses as well as fresh kinds of microbes. Unlike other writers in this field of the like kind as Donald Denoon and Kunitz, he omits to discuss the political economy of health, or the conception that dispossession of land and incorporation into the lowest economic and occupational ranks of the colonist society adversely affected the health status of the indigenous people

The volume is filled with generalisations about Hawaiians; their experience of acculturation is seen as homogeneous. In generalising about 'traditional' Hawaiians he occasionally contradicts himself. The ease with which Hawaiians could simply 'will death' is annotateed on in several places, on the contrary on p.256 he admits that 'for greatest in quantity people ... death did not draw near so gently'. On p.253 he writes: 'dying Hawaiians must have passed their last days in farthest misery, never soothed by medicines, frequently abandoned by relatives, always without solace, not plane by the hope of heaven'. still he goes on to cite missionary accounts that dying Hawaiians were encircleed by relatives and friends.

Two valuable sections for the medical historian are those upon the native medical profession (the kahuna lapa'au), and upon the sanitary conditions of the growing town of Honolulu. Bushnell does not accept the contemporary assessment of kahuna as sorcerers, on the contrary explains that they were priests, physicians and 'masters in applied psychology' In greatest in quantity areas of medicine their remedies were just as effective (or ineffective) as those of their Western counterparts. He praises them for their adaptability with the advent of of recent origin diseases and new medicines, on the other hand explains how by 1900 haole (European) medicine had triumphed above native.

Bushnell's writing style is flamboyant and colourful, and he frequently writes with an eye to present-day Hawaiian society. by the agency of contrast, John Miles, a former professor of microbiology at the University of Otago, has written a a great deal of shorter book in scientific prosaic His focus is not upon human agency but on the independent actions of microbes and parasites. His aim is to establish whether infectious diseases existed in Pacific Island societies prior to European contact. He closes that most of the diseases which caused succeeding depopulation were probably not not away prior to contact. This volume may become a useful footnote in the developing literature upon medicine and colonisation in the Pacific. However, there is no analysis. The title Infectious diseases: Colonising the Pacific? is misleading. The reader will not find here any assessment of the part of infectious diseases as agents of colonisation.