Dear Cristiana, a beautiful response and clarification. Thank you for posting
it.Um forte abraco,Victor Rangel-Ribeiro
On Sunday, April 23, 2023 at 07:57:35 PM EDT, cristiana bastos
<[email protected]> wrote:
Dear Dr Figueiredo, I am most thankful for your careful reading of the chapter
"Medicine on the Edge: Luso-Asian Encounters on the Island of Chiloane,
Mozambique", which i wrote in collaboration with historian Ana Cristina Roque.
I use this opportunity to share the article with whoever may have an interest
in reading it; here is the link for access
https://repositorio.ul.pt/bitstream/10451/22559/1/ICS_CBastos_Medicine_CLI.pdf
Articles that come to life as chapters of edited volumes sometimes become
forgotten or accessible to very few; we who write them have to choose between
having them in the good company of others in a carefully curated volume (as is
the case, in my humble opinion, of the volumes Histories of Medicine and
Healing in thelndian Ocean World, edited by Anna Winterbottom and Facil Tesfaye
at Palgrave) or having it as a solo article, getting more points in academic
evaluations and longer afterlives. I am very happy I published this one in its
venue but I always feared it was not read by many. Thanks to Dr Figueiredo's
careful reading, it may have a chance to arrive to more pairs of eyes now.
I am delighted with a critical discussion of its contents. I do not accept
insults and perjuries (false accusations) but I much enjoy criticisms that are
supported on reading and on arguments. Once again, I thank DR Figueiredo and
apologize for not having read the previous chapters of what seems to be a
volume in the making. I happened to read this one as by coincidence this is
the very chapter I chose, along others on other matters that are not related to
Goa, to provide as background reading to my presentation in the HIstory of
Science and Medicine seminar at Harvard this week.
I came across Arthur Ignacio da Gama through his reports on the island of
Chiloane, which i found when researching systematically the sources of the
health services of the Portuguese colonial archives for the 19th century
(Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisboa). If I were a film-maker or a novelist
i might have gone deeper into this character: a young doctor who found himself
a stranger in a strange land with little support (the health services in
Mozambique were minimal, and on that little island were next to nothing),
little demand (Africans were reluctant to accept western medicine which came in
a package that was not necessarily friendly at the time, to put it very
lightly), and, what he did not know but I got to learn through other sources,
little time of life in this world. He died young and not much after he wrote
the report.
I worked earlier on Arthur Gama's report on another chapter published in
Portuguese in the early 2000s, "O Médico e o Inhamessoro" - but i always wanted
to go further. Could never accomplish the project of going to Chiloane --
maybe some day in the future, but it did not happen so far, and in the meantime
I am working with very different topics and oter geographical contexts. When
Anna Wintterbottom invited me for a conference at McGill on Medicine and
Healing in the Ocean Indian World in 2010 - the one that led to the two volumes
-- I revisited the case, which seemed made for the theme. And to my great
pleasure, in the meantime, I got to know the work of Ana Roque, who is a
specialist on Mozambique and had worked about Ezequiel da Silva's herbarium of
Chiloane. Working with her was a pleasure -- those rare moments when two
different researchers converge in sharing findings that took each of them
years to gather and think through... and when the end result is more than the
sum of the parts.
A couple of notes. As much as I sympathized with the subject and character of
Arthur Gama, and wanted to write about him, I had to deal with the fact that
through his writings there were some comments about Africans that were terribly
racist. Maybe I toned down the citations in this chapter. Transcribing them
makes me feel bad -- they were quite offensive and it is one of the things that
most bothered me along the project on colonial medicine was having to deal with
that sort of language used at the time. Equally offensive, and abundant, were
the comments written by Portuguese supervisors about Goan doctors serving in
Mozambique: horribly racist against Indians in general -- offensive to my eyes.
Reading those documents through and through got me to what became my
understanding of the difficult position of 19th century Goan doctors recruited
to serve in Africa -- despised by their Portuguese supervisors, and often
expressing despise for the Africans around them. But this is what came out of
the sources -- I cannot go back in a time travel to talk to them, hear them,
and have a more sophisticated perception of what they went through. One thing i
know: it was a 19th century experience, pre-Berlin conference, and extremely
different than what may have been the experiences after the first WW.
Maybe I tend to edit out of my writing the direct quotation of those discourses
-- if I have an "ideological bias", it is that of my commitment to oppose
racism and not perpetuate it by transcribing racist language (anti-African,
anti-Asian, etc). Otherwise, I think that readers can judge by themselves
whether I support my analysis on evidence or not -- I totally accept different
interpretations, but I would think that it is very clear that the evidence is
there, in multiple footnotes and an appendix that provides the sources to know
the year of graduation of Arthur Gama.
I will be more than happy to help clarify any further point. However I
apologize for the fact that at the moment I am overwhelmed with the end of the
semester at UMass Lowell, where I taught for this term, and at Harvard, where I
spent the semester as visiting researcher to complete some writing projects; I
have to wrap everything as I will soon go back to my bassi in Lisbon.
Thank you all for reading, and thanks DR Figueiredo for your criticisms.
cristiana
PS: more articles can be downloaded here: https://cristianabastos.org/
On Sat, Apr 22, 2023 at 2:41 PM JOHN DE FIGUEIREDO <[email protected]>
wrote:
Attached please findthe following document
"A Goan Doctor in Africa and his “Europeaness”
Titles of previous posts of this series:
Introduction
The Scope of Dr. Bastos' Research
Ideological Framework
Empire vs Nation, Subjects vsCitizens
The Lusified Subaltern Doctors andtheir Peculiar Medical School
Please note:
(a) The attachednotes are copyrighted. All rights reserved. No part of
this series of posts maybe copied, reproduced or transmitted by mechanical,
electronic or any othermeans without my prior permission.
(b) The opinionsexpressed on the attached notes are my own and should not
be construed asendorsed by Yale University where I teach or any other
organization to which Ibelong.
Sincerely,
John M. de Figueiredo
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