4 Medicine and racial politics

Abstract

This chapter argues that the testimony of medical men occupied a central position in the aspect of Victorian polemic and policy-making. It examines a selection of nineteenth-century medical attitudes toward the Polynesian people of New Zealand, the Maori. The chapter also considers some of the institutions of imperial medicine. It argues that the provision of hospitals for the Maori was also undertaken with quite specific social and political purposes in view. The chapter identifies four nineteenth-century images of the Maori. They have been characterised as examples of the Noble, the Romantic, the Amalgamating, and the Dying Savage. Arthur Thomson provided an even more explicit and detailed medical defence of the policy of racial amalgamation. The chapter shows that John Savage's image of the Maori as (almost) Noble Savages was an expression of a prevalent contemporary attitude toward the indigenous inhabitants of the Pacific.

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