This article provides an overview of the historiography of medical education and calls for greater attention to the connections between medical schools. It begins by reviewing research on medical education in imperial metropoles. Researchers have compared medical schools in different national contexts, traced travellers between them or examined the hierarchies that medical education created within the medical profession. The article then shows how historians have emphasised the ways in which medicine in colonial empires was shaped by negotiation, exchange, hybridisation and competition. The final part of the article introduces the special issue ‘Medical Education in Empires’. Drawing on a variety of sources in English, French, Dutch and Chinese, the special issue builds on these historiographies by juxtaposing cases of medical schools in imperial contexts since the eighteenth century. It considers who funded these medical schools and why, what models of medicine underpinned their creation, what social changes they contributed to, what life was like in these schools, who the students and teachers were and what graduates did with their medical careers. This special issue thus contributes to clarifying the role of medical education in empires and the long-term impact of empires on the medical world.

In 1851, the colonial administration of the Dutch East Indies established a two-year program to educate young Javanese men to become vaccinators in Batavia (today’s Jakarta). During the following sixty years, the medical curriculum was expanded several times; in 1913, it consisted of a ten-year program. In 1927, the Batavia Medical School, granting degrees equivalent to those of Dutch university-affiliated medical schools, commenced operations. Consequently, a steadily increasing number of Indonesian physicians with various credentials were employed by the colonial health service, plantations, sugar factories and mines, or established private practices. They became a social group that occupied an ambiguous and even paradoxical position somewhere between Europeans and the indigenous population. During the 1910s, this inspired these physicians to obtain credentials and professional recognition equal to those of their European colleagues. Several of them became active in journalism, politics and social movements. During the 1920s, several became radicalised and criticised the nature of colonial society. In the 1930s, following the increasingly repressive nature of colonial society, most of them remained active in the public sphere while a small group dedicated itself to improving medical research and health care. After the transfer of sovereignty from the Netherlands to Indonesia on 27 December 1949, this small cadre reestablished medical education and health care, and built the Indonesian medical profession.

In 1942, the British Minister of Health commissioned a report from the newly established Advisory Committee on Mothers and Young Children into ‘What can be done to intensify the effort to secure more breast feeding of infants?’. To make their case, the members of the sub-committee put in charge of the report sought expert testimony on the benefits of breastfeeding. They consulted medical officers of health, maternity and child-welfare officers, health visitors, midwives, obstetricians, paediatricians and a physician in private practice. They also consulted five ‘psychologists’ (a contemporary umbrella term for psychologists, psychoanalysts and psychiatrists). It is not surprising that the committee turned to medical professionals, as infant feeding had long been an area of their expertise. However, seeking the views of ‘psychologists’ when establishing the benefits of breastfeeding marked a more innovative development, one which suggested that a shift in conceptualising the significance of breastfeeding was gathering pace. In the interwar period, psychoanalysts and psychoanalytically oriented psychiatrists showed growing interest in early infancy. It led to an extensive psychoanalytic engagement with contemporary feeding advice disseminated by the medical profession. This article will explore the divergences and intersections of medical and psychoanalytic theories on breastfeeding in the first half of the twentieth century, concluding with a consideration of how medical ideas on breastfeeding had absorbed some of the contentions of ‘psy’-approaches to infant feeding by the post-war period.

This paper focuses on homeopaths’ strategies to popularise homeopathy from 1850 to 1870. I argue that homeopaths created a space for homeopathy in Mexico City in the mid-nineteenth century by facilitating patients’ access to medical knowledge, consultation and practice. In this period, when national and international armed conflicts limited the diffusion and regulation of academic medicine, homeopaths popularised homeopathy by framing it as a life-enhancing therapy with tools that responded to patients’ needs. Patients’ preference for homeopathy evolved into commercial endeavours that promoted the practice of homeopathy through the use of domestic manuals. Using rare publications and archival records, I analyse the popularisation of homeopathy in Ramón Comellas’s homeopathic manual, the commercialisation of Julián González’s family guides, and patients’ and doctors’ reception of homeopathy. I show that narratives of conversion to homeopathy relied on the different experiences of patients and trained doctors, and that patients’ positive experience with homeopathy weighed more than the doctors’ efforts to explain to the public how academic medicine worked. The fact that homeopaths and patients used a shared language to describe disease experiences framed the possibility of a horizontal transmission of medical knowledge, opening up the possibility for patients to become practitioners. By relying on the long tradition of domestic medicine in Mexico, the popularisation of homeopathy disrupted the professional boundaries that academic physicians had begun to build, making homeopaths the largest group that challenged the emergent medical academic culture and its diffusion in Mexico in the nineteenth century.

This article discusses an under-researched group and provides an analytical overview of the comparative experiences of African, Indian and Coloured doctors at South African universities during the apartheid era. It probes diversity of experience in training and practice as well as gendered differentiation amongst black students before going on to discuss the careers and political activism of black doctors as well as the impact of recent transformational change on their position. It briefly assesses how singular this South African experience was.