Living with Death: Local and Imperial Medical Cultures in Port on St. Helena, 1659–1833

St. Helena was a common stopover for East India Company ships passing to and from Asia and an important node in the early modern British Empire. Two seamen’s maladies in particular were associated with the island port of Jamestown—venereal disease, which shore leave spread, and malnutrition, which the islands’ stores could cure. Ships’ doctors brought professional medicine—such as it was—from the imperial metropolis, only to discover islanders had a local medical culture of their own: folk remedies, seamen’s cures and traditional medicine from the island’s slave and free black population.
This dynamic was not unique to St. Helena, but St. Helena provides a unique window to examine it. For nearly two centuries the Company sent doctors and clergymen (who stood in in a doctor’s absence) to this island prebend while also staffing the ships in port. Company administration and trade continued together longer on St. Helena than on other British Atlantic colonies, creating a solid run of medical records. Ship’s medical logs, now stored in London, as well as church, medical and demographic records from the archives in St. Helena allow an examination of the port’s medical culture from both the island and the sea. In so doing, the local history of St. Helena—an island now being more fully integrated in to imperial historiography—can be made to address broader, imperial concerns and shed light on the interaction between the centralizing cultural forces of empire, trade and professional medicine, and the localizing cultural forces at work on the island.