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Colonial surgery in a time of medical reform : Wouter Schouten in the Dutch Golden Age
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Florence : European University Institute, 2025
EUI; HEC; PhD Thesis
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BECKER, Jan, Colonial surgery in a time of medical reform : Wouter Schouten in the Dutch Golden Age, Florence : European University Institute, 2025, EUI, HEC, PhD Thesis - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/94172
Abstract
This thesis examines how the Dutch Republic’s colonial expansion reshaped the social world of early modern medicine through a microhistory of the life and writings of Wouter Schouten (1638–1704), a ship surgeon who served the Dutch East India Company before returning to his native city of Haarlem. In colonial settings, surgeons assumed tasks well beyond surgery’s theoretical bounds, stepping into roles of physicians and pharmacists alike. This practical colonial experience effectively rendered colonial surgeons as transversal medical practitioners and furnished returning surgeons, like Schouten, with new confidence to claim standing within the Republic’s civic and medical spheres. Back home, surgeons used print to translate colonial experience into civic and medical authority, challenging academic physicians’ efforts to regulate medicine in urban settings. Tracing the codification of colonial experiences and their instrumentalisation in regulatory claims for better medicine, this thesis focuses primarily on Schouten’s vast and diverse writings. These writings, and the role colonial surgeons played in urban medical politics more generally, unsettle standard historical narratives which frame the seventeenth century as an era of medical reform driven by Cartesian theory and universitytrained physicians. Rather than seeking drivers of change within university settings and philosophical debate, this thesis focuses on those medical practitioners responsible for medical practice in the colonies, namely, surgeons. Medical practice in colonial settings, this thesis argues, became a key point of reference as surgeons constructed their medical authority and civic identity. Surgeons sought to shape medical practice in the Dutch Republic by promoting medical theories and regulatory institutional structures that served their self-perception as the drivers of colonial medicine.
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Defence date: 05 December 2025
Examining Board: Prof. Lauren Kassell (European University Institute); Prof. Giorgio Riello (European University Institute); Prof. Dániel Margócsy (University of Cambridge); Dr Hannah Murphy (King’s College London)
Examining Board: Prof. Lauren Kassell (European University Institute); Prof. Giorgio Riello (European University Institute); Prof. Dániel Margócsy (University of Cambridge); Dr Hannah Murphy (King’s College London)