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Colonial Public Health in the Early Twentieth-century Caribbean
| The second half of the nineteenth century and the first few decades of the twentieth is a period that saw many changes in the fields of health and medicine internationally. These included such developments as growing government attention to public health problems and sanitation, the increasing professionalization and specialization of health workers, and changing ideas about the nature of disease and disease causation. These occurred in North America and Europe, but also in areas of European colonization. Although scholars have examined the nature of public health policies in European colonies in Africa and Asia in the early twentieth century and the role of metropolitan influence on their development, the scholarship on the colonized territories of the Caribbean is much less extensive for this period. This paper will compare the kinds of public health policies developed in parts of the French and British Caribbean in the 1930s, focussing on Barbados and Guadeloupe. It will explore the extent to which metropolitan public health policies and local Caribbean realities such as hybrid cultures and societies and physical environments very different from those of the metropole shaped the policies that were developed and the ways in which they were implemented. This paper is based on French and British Caribbean government reports and archival sources.
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