The Diagnostics of Description

The medical association between space and health was by no means a new idea. The notion that geographical location had a significant effect on human health had a long history behind it: the texts of the Hippocratic Corpus trace the source of epidemic diseases to seasonal changes and meteorological conditions.⁹ The period of European exploration and expansion on a massive scale between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, brought renewed awareness of the global variations of disease. The fatal consequences of colonial travel for both indigenous and alien populations had made the existence of unique disease environments an increasingly important medical preoccupation. Indeed, the problems attendant on adapting to new climates were a more persistently significant obstacle to imperial expansion than the moral problem of slavery. ‘Of all the objections to colonization offered by English writers from the sixteenth century onward’, as Jim Egan puts it, ‘none proved more resilient than those focused on climate.’¹⁰ The Caribbean islands as a set of geographical and medical environments were distinguished from more temperate European climes, and tropical climates were understood to be the root cause of the devastatingly high mortality rates amongst British travellers and military personnel. The growing awareness of disease agents as localized entities became the keystone of a new medical method, prompting a colonial project which engaged in mapping geographical spaces across the globe in terms of their endemic diseases. The late eighteenth century brought an age of regionalized medicine which sought to map localities according to which diseases were found to be present.¹¹

Drawing on a combination of humoral-climatic and miasmatic theories, medical geography and topography constructed an opposition between healthy and unhealthy spaces, centring on a model of atmospheric infection caused by dirt, stagnation and intemperate conditions as primary disease agents. The humoral-climatic understanding of disease drew on the model of the four bodily humours and connected them to the seasons, weather and natural environment. Earlier versions of Hippocratic epidemiology and meteorology were expanded, and now focused on a hypothesis of aerial contagion. From an earlier conception of air as a simple and inactive entity, atmospheric discourse followed Robert Boyle’s assertion that air was in fact a ‘confus’d Aggregate of Effluviums from such differing Bodies’ and developed an idea of air as a dynamic system of particles.¹² The London physician (and creator of the John Bull figure) John Arbuthnot argued in his Essay concerning the Effects of Air on Human Bodies (1733) that the airs of specific locations caused not only particular maladies but also different human physical and social characteristics, writing that ‘the Air operates sensibly in forming the constitutions of Mankind, the Specialties of Features, Complexion, Temper, and consequently the Manners’.¹³ By the 1770s, Joseph Priestley’s work on airs had become integrated into a programme of reformist policy based on the possibility of meliorating the noxious qualities of particular airs.¹⁴ Meteorological observation became a crucial part of medical practice: influential Irish physician and surgeon James Johnson noted from his experience in India that in assessing the effects on health of tropical climates ‘the direction and prevalence of winds are ever to be coupled with the medical topography of a place’.¹⁵ Medical opinion was now unified in the idea that different geographical settings held different airs and different diseases. The movement of disease occurred via noxious vapours rising from putrescent organic matter, and the West Indian environment, with its overheated, humid atmosphere and the resulting production of stagnating airs emanating either from marshlands or from densely forested areas, was considered a hotbed of disease. Within the contemporary aetiological and epidemiological understanding, malaria, yellow fever and other diseases were airborne, so colonial medical geographies focused their attention on the miasmata in the ‘bad air’ caused by environmental corruption and on the identification of visible signs of aerial sources of disease.

Following the work of earlier British medics such as Sydenham, whose work examined the significance of seasonal weather changes, the practice of medical geography was developed and institutionalized by German physicians such as Leonhard Ludwig Finke.¹⁶ Medical geography, as Finke wrote, ‘looked at the whole world from a medical point of view’.¹⁷ This ‘medical point of view’ was grounded in the belief that all human diseases had environmental origins: ‘to which diseases and evils man is exposed, because he lives here and not somewhere else, because he breathes this and no other air, he eats this and no other food, drinks this and no other water, has this and no other way of living and so on’.¹⁸ Finke’s work charted the world’s diseases, establishing correlations between the places where people lived and the diseases from which they suffered. This medicalization of the atmosphere, as Richard Grove writes, created a new role for medical practitioners in relation to the management of disease and the regulation of social and environmental health.¹⁹ Both the need to control disease and the new supervisory role of medical professionals were particularly significant in colonial plantation societies, and doctors and surgeons in large numbers took upon themselves the project of diagnosing tropical environments. The empirical study of the relationship between geography and disease aimed to create a set of practices which were concerned with either warnings against human inhabitation or proactive measures to alter an environment’s salubrity. By the early nineteenth century, ‘medical geography’ had become a discipline encompassing elements of cartography, geography, geology, medicine, meteorology and topography. The focus on pathogenic places structured physical space in medical terms; disease was perceived as a geographical phenomenon, and the concept of ‘place’ was fundamentally medicalized.

On the basis of topographical accounts of natural surroundings, medical practitioners produced knowledge of which noxious environmental features – and therefore which diseases – were local to the area. German physician and European public health pioneer Johann Peter Frank instructed medical topographers in the importance of description in his A System of Complete Medical Police (1779–1817). For Frank, medical topographies made an ‘extremely important contribution for those who have to look after the health and well-being of a country. Every publicly employed physician or district physician, should supply the medical description of his region as accurately as possible, and compare every change in weather, every phenomenon concerning the healthiness of a place’.²⁰ The medical description of climatic regions meant detailed written and pictorial accounts of the appearance of landscapes, catalogues of plant and animal life, descriptions of human living spaces and agricultural structures and assessing the purity of the air. Meticulous examination was crucial: ‘humane physicians should be set to explore the nature, condition and constitution of the tiniest village. They should investigate its diseases and their causes in the most precise detail’.²¹ This work was not only the domain of the physician, however: ‘correct topographies supplied by art experts’ were also an essential part of medical geographical work.²² In the context of such professional overlap between physicians and artists, medical topographies and imaginative representations of landscape should be read as co-existing within a wider discourse of medical aesthetics. The cultural prioritization of the visual – what Peter de Bolla describes as ‘a culture based on the visual, on modalities of visualization, the production and consumption of visual matter’ – emerged in medical discourse as an affirmation of medical models which presumed visible markers of the presence of disease.²³ This visual focus was connected to the identification of environmental pollution and meteorological and geographical markers as signs of disease. The leading medical geographer of the West Indies, James Lind, identifies and categorizes the ‘signs of an unhealthy country’, such as swarms of insects, thick fogs, densely wooded areas, marshes, swamps and particular types of soil and sand, and pays particular attention to the miasmata caused by environmental corruption found in particular geographical formations.²⁴

Perhaps the best forewarning of disease, though, was the weather. The heat, humidity and volatility of the tropical climate were considered primary disease agents, and medics began to combine meteorological observation with records of associated illnesses. William Hillary, a student of Herman Boerhaave, who went on to practise medicine in Barbados between 1747 and 1758, published one of the best-known and most widely followed treatises on Caribbean diseases, Observations on the Changes of the Air, and the Concomitant Epidemical Diseases of Barbadoes (1759). For six years Hillary kept detailed daily records of the temperature and pressure of the air and the quantities of rain that fell in each month and year. He summarized the Barbadian weather and concurrent diseases on a monthly basis, finding variations in the types and number of occurrences of particular maladies depending on the weather and season, concluding that most of the diseases he encountered in Barbados were ‘indigenous and endemial in the West-India islands, or peculiar to the Torrid Zone; and are seldom or never seen in the colder European nations’.²⁵ Within this differential climatic model, weather was understood as global, patterned change, structured within a Virgilian tradition of meteorological and agricultural prognostication based on the observation of natural signs such as the appearance of the sky or plant life – Mary Favret’s ‘georgic weather’.²⁶ Favret’s use of ‘georgic’ as a framing term highlights the role of weather in the diagnosis and ‘improvement’ of land.²⁷

Meteorological observation was put to use in partnership with medical topography as part of the visual decoding of the physical environment, as early work by Lind, Hillary and others formed the beginning of a collective attempt to expose and interpret the visible signifiers of unhealthy tropical places. John Williamson, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh, worked in Jamaica from 1798 to 1812 and kept monthly records of weather and the relative health of plants and people. The humid climate of the West Indies, he found, was far from the picture of health. In his entry for January 1806, Williamson notes: ‘a visit among woody parts, or along the banks of rivers, where immense masses of vegetable matter are passing into decomposition, and their sensible effects on the atmosphere, will convince any person how injurious to health such impregnations must be’.²⁸ Williamson’s emphasis on the visible source of atmospheric corruption highlights the visual politics of pollution at stake in the medical geographical model. Though its atmospheric effects are unseen, the visible existence of rotting plants appears to trigger other kinds of unspecified ‘sensible effects’ which alert the observer to the presence of disease. While the actual point of contagion – especially miasmatic clouds – was not always directly visible, the look of the land could instruct the medic or the traveller in essential local medical knowledge.

The notion of the beautiful but torpid and pathogenic tropical climate was situated within a medicalized visual framework which shaped landscape imagery and the examination of natural surroundings. Description, already the cornerstone of Enlightenment natural knowledge, took on even greater significance in colonial contexts, where distance prevented most Europeans from closer contact with exotic people, objects, landscapes and diseases – indeed, the textual labour of description was particularly important in the West Indies.²⁹ By the 1790s, American physician Valentine Seaman was making use of the new practice of medical cartography to depict yellow fever epidemics in New York; in the nineteenth century, medical maps were used to illustrate cholera outbreaks in Europe.³⁰ However, while it is possible that medical cartography was practised in the Caribbean to some extent (although the expense of publishing images is likely to have been prohibitive), no medical maps from the region during this period appear to remain extant today. Rather, the texts produced by physicians and surgeons working in the Caribbean use topographical description to assess the relative health of particular environmental regions, descriptive textual practices became a crucial aspect of colonial medical science holding great diagnostic and prognostic significance. The idea of the natural sign as diagnostic aid is expressed in medical geography through the use of description as an interpretative tool; meteorological and topographical signs were understood as the key to demystifying tropical environments. Medical topography focused on the detailed comparison between the surface appearances of landscapes: what a landscape looked like meant as much in terms of its relative health as did a record of which diseases had been witnessed there, and the alignment of health and visibility characterizes the scientific understanding of landscape in this period.

Colonial Picturesque

Alongside the thickening descriptive practices of colonial science, literary authors also used textual practices of description to articulate the immense cultural, economic and medical significance of landscape. Heriot’s Descriptive Poem followed the fashion for descriptive and didactic styles which shaped literary accounts of the Caribbean colonies such as Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane, John Singleton’s blank verse General Description of the West-Indian Islands (1767), sailor-turned-abolitionist Edward Rushton’s West-Indian Eclogues (1787), Thomas Moore’s Epistles, Odes and Other Poems (1806) (Moore is perhaps best known for burning Byron’s memoirs but also worked for the Admiralty in Bermuda) and William Beckford’s Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (1790). Through the transition from georgic to pastoral and picturesque modes, writers used aesthetic description to prioritize landscape over labour. ‘By mediating their representations of the West Indies through eclogue, and through pastoral-descriptive modes in general’, Karen O’Brien argues, colonial poets suggested that, ‘whatever the depredations of slavery, the real value of the colony was guaranteed by its landscape: the land was both anterior and surplus to forms of labour’.³¹ The emphatically visual register of the pastoral-descriptive mode, as Geoff Quilley has written, enabled planters and travellers to ‘insist on the materiality of the landscape, as a form of reaction to the destabilizing effects upon the plantocracy’s economy and constitution of the events of the American Revolution and the growing metropolitan anti-slavery campaign’.³² The political and economic significance of colonial land, and the need for the military, plantation owners and medical professionals to establish territorial, agricultural and disease control, made landscape a key conceptual and material vehicle for the production of imperial power.

The institutionalization of medical geography coincided with the fascination with scenic landscape dominating British and colonial literary and artistic imagery, and particularly with what Ann Bermingham calls ‘the cult of the picturesque’.³³ As well as the agricultural boom beginning in the mid-1790s and the subsequent changing social relations between urban and rural areas, the picturesque emerged in relation to increasing travel and imperial concerns. W. J. T. Mitchell stresses the importance of recognizing the colonial contexts of domestic landscape production, arguing that ‘landscape is a particular historical formation associated with European imperialism’:

More specifically, Jeffrey Auerbach and Geoff Quilley draw a line between English and colonial forms of picturesque aesthetics. ‘While scholars of the picturesque have generally focused on its English origins’, Auerbach writes, ‘it is important to note that many of its foremost practitioners drew their inspiration as much from the empire itself as from the English Lake District.’³⁵ In the colonies, the picturesque was the predominant mode employed to represent the plantation, and a crucial part of transforming the colonization of peoples, plants and spaces into an aesthetically pleasing and morally gratifying vision. For Auerbach, the picturesque was a homogenizing force which functioned to unite the disparate regions of Empire.³⁶ But the picturesque was an elastic, capacious mode that was easily adapted for diverse ideological ends in both the metropole and the colonies. While some colonial physicians and authors drew on the picturesque imagery of ‘home’ in order to stake their claim over the colonies, other representations of colonial landscapes were motivated by the desire to create a differential aesthetic between Europe and the Caribbean.³⁷ Elizabeth Bohls describes the picturesque as a ‘paradoxically placeless’ aesthetics of place ‘grounded in mobility and comparison’.³⁸ This lack of geographical rootedness meant that just as the domestic picturesque was formed in the wider context of empire, images of New World landscapes were able to draw on, recontextualize and renegotiate the British picturesque.

West Indian planters and slavery apologists often engaged with the principles of medical geography to depict a genial, salubrious colonial environment. The Wiltshire-born planter, politician and historian Bryan Edwards, who lived in Jamaica for much of his adult life, draws on the aerial model of health in his construction of the island as a rural haven, envisaging himself:

The breezy luxury of Edwards’s self-congratulatory colonial scene invites the metropolitan reader into a rich, leisurely tropical environment. Jamaica’s pleasing airs are held up in explicit contrast with other tropical climates: Mexico is ‘fraught with poison’ from its contaminating silver mines and Africa is filled with ‘stagnate air’ which ‘o’erpow’rs / Life’s functions’.⁴⁰ Indeed, Jamaica was thought of by some as one of the healthiest islands in the West Indies, because its mountainous regions were refreshed by vigorous breezes, though others preferred the flatter topography of Barbados on the assumption that it was less likely to retain noxious miasmata.

Edwards’s erasure of labour and violence, and exaltation in a healthy environment, characterize ameliorationist writing at this point. But no one aestheticized the Caribbean more fervently than William Beckford. Beckford was the Jamaica-born first cousin of William Thomas Beckford of Fonthill Abbey – the English Beckford was the author of the Orientalist gothic classic Vathek (1786). On his father’s death in 1756, the Jamaican Beckford inherited four sugar plantations, and after an education at Oxford and travels through Europe he and his wife returned to Jamaica in 1774 and remained there until 1786. Hurricanes depleted his enormous fortunes, and on his return to England Beckford was incarcerated as a debtor in the Fleet Prison and found himself with time on his hands to write the Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica (1790). During his time in the West Indies, Beckford was patron to several artists whom he invited to visit his plantation, including the landscape painter George Robertson. The Descriptive Account is immersed in tropical landscape through the visual lens of the picturesque; Jill Casid reads it as a ‘painting of words’, while Elizabeth Bohls describes Beckford’s aesthetic enthrallment as ‘compulsive’.⁴¹ Seeing land in terms of its potential for being rendered artistically, Beckford’s fascination with the visual realm is expressed through the use of painting analogies to present an idealized and harmonious landscape:

The use of painting imagery and the description of landscape as superficial adornment on the ‘face’ of Jamaica betray a desire to empty the landscape of meaning beyond the aesthetic. Beckford bears witness to tropical nature through a visual mode that signals the colonial appropriation of land, or what Anthony Pagden calls the ‘autoptic imagination’.⁴³ But Beckford also continually replaces his own narrative subject position, synechdochically, with the singularized but generic ‘eye’, distancing the colonial subject from landscape – as well as from labouring slaves, whom he assimilates into these aestheticized surroundings, and whose labour is imagined as less arduous than that experienced by the British working classes. Written at a time when the abolitionist threat to the lifestyle and livelihood of the plantocracy was growing, the aestheticizing impulse is firmly rooted in a politics of reaction to abolitionism and is concerned to legitimize what Keith Sandiford calls a ‘Creole cultural imperium’.⁴⁴ Beckford’s transcendent eye surveys a selective view, erasing labour and violence from its picturesque scene in ways that have been discussed by John Barrell, Tim Barringer, Édouard Glissant and others, and performing what Sara Suleri calls acts of ‘profound unlooking’ which indicate the ‘desire to transfix a dynamic cultural confrontation into a still life, converting a pictorial imperative into a gesture of self-protection that allows the colonial gaze a license to convert its ability not to see into studiously visual representations’.⁴⁵ Beckford’s Descriptive Account operates in this kind of colonial picturesque style, evacuating social realities and conveniently bestowing innocence on colonial imagery that might otherwise present its metropolitan audiences with disturbing scenes of horrific violence.

The title of the Descriptive Account announces the privilege conferred upon the interpretative labour of the author as a means of communicating the colonial world to the metropolitan reader. The aesthetic ideals of the picturesque drew on the precise, technical vocabulary of topography in creating a conjoint sense of empirical veracity and judicious taste. William Gilpin had stressed the need for an ‘analytical view’, writing that ‘to render a description of [landscape] more intelligible; and to shew more distinctly the sources of that kind of beauty, with which it abounds; it may be proper, before we examine the scenes themselves, to take a sort of analytical view of the materials, which compose them—mountains—lakes—broken—grounds—wood—rocks—cascades—vallies—and rivers’.⁴⁶ Beckford matches Gilpin’s precision and empirical motivation, emphasizing his wish to ‘minutely describe’ the Jamaican environment with ‘eyes unprejudiced’ and praising the ‘fidelity’ and ‘accuracy’ of Robertson’s engravings which were ‘taken on the spot’.⁴⁷ Joining the language of aesthetic feeling to the measured grammar of climatic observation, he writes: ‘between one and two o’clock, the clouds begin to brew, the sky is obscured, and the heat increases in proportion to the obnebulation of the sun: the atmosphere is, for a time, peculiarly heavy; the thermometer rises from eighty to ninety degrees; the clouds are black, the day obscured, the winds asleep, and Nature still’.⁴⁸ It is the language of ‘stillness’ which links Beckford’s picturesque with Gilpin’s emphasis on ‘tranquillity’, ‘composure’ and ‘repose’. The sense of repose in Gilpin’s picturesque, as Alan Liu argues, performs an act of visual ‘arrest’ which erases motive.⁴⁹ Beckford’s aestheticizing impulse betrays the desire politically (and medically) to stabilize the colonial climate and landscape, attempting to erase the material realities of colonial life by rendering landscape as artistic, rather than actual. His emphasis is on the empirical detail of description – the text begins, for example, with detailed lists of settlements, plantations and the roads through the island – suggests an investment in the idea of landscape as a stable entity, as well as in a model of vision as singular. The Jamaican climate, he writes, ‘has charms to arrest the regard; and to fix the attention of every beholder’.⁵⁰

But Beckford’s colonial picturesque is by no means entirely static or immobile, and there are moments when the tranquillity of the scene collapses. With its ‘alternations of stifling heat and trembling cold, of glowing haze and flitting showers’, stability is the one characteristic the volatile tropical climate does not have.⁵¹ Picturesque imagery prized the kind of variety everywhere in abundance in Beckford’s Jamaica. ‘The heavens are at one time all brightness’, Beckford writes, ‘at another they become all gloom: they sometimes seem to be in conflict, and to struggle for transcendency; and now the light, and now the showers, prevail: and these variations may be almost daily observed’.⁵² It is the extreme variations of the tropical climate, however, which push the aesthetic imagination to its limits, and Beckford’s descriptive labour is emphasized in his repeated exclamations that his surroundings are ‘not in [his] power’ to describe.⁵³ The impossibility of rendering Jamaica’s meteorological fluctuations in descriptive form is matched by its imperviousness to attempts to capture it in visual representation: ‘during my residence of nearly thirteen years in the Island’, he writes, ‘I did not meet with one single artist who could take an exact outline of nature.’⁵⁴ The struggle to give a full account of his colonial surroundings is not only due to the overwhelming sublimity of the Jamaican landscape, but also, crucially, to the effects of climate on the body. Beckford attributes the artistic neglect to which Jamaica has fallen victim to the problems of aesthetic appreciation in the tropics and the ‘difficulty and consequent fatigue with which the least exertion in that climate is sure to be attended; a climate that very soon, and perceptibly, in many subjects, relaxes the nervous system, makes indolence succeed to industry, disease to health, and disappointment and vexation undermine the body, and care and despondency overcome and at last destroy the vigour of the mind’.⁵⁵ Even in Beckford’s Creole politics of the picturesque – what Bohls calls the ‘planter picturesque’ – the degrading effects of the sun threaten to arrest the act of aesthetic appreciation: ‘as the sun advances, and its beams are diffused, the most enchanting landscape will hardly make amends for the excess of heat and the enervating languor with which it is constantly attended’.⁵⁶ Arresting the act of observation, the ‘excesses’ of the Jamaican climate forestall the colonial gaze and serve as a reminder that the colonist as viewing subject is also subject to the forces of tropical nature. Despite his pro-slavery agenda and inclination to present the desirable face of Jamaica to his metropolitan readership, Beckford’s account reveals a creeping tension in the relationship between aesthetics and health that compares to that suggested by Heriot and Chisholm. Much as the plantation picturesque of Beckford’s protégé George Robertson’s Jamaican paintings is built on what Tim Barringer describes as the ‘unresolved paradox’ of the celebration of large-scale capitalist production co-existing with the premodern genre of the estate portrait, neither can their verbal counterpart sustain its aesthetic vision.⁵⁷ In Beckford’s text, the ‘colonial immunity’ that Sara Suleri has argued underpins imperial visual production is overtly medical, and is compromised by the vulnerability of landscape and its appreciation to the tropical climate, as the pressure placed upon the aesthetic by the pathogenic Caribbean environment interferes with the transcendent eye of the picturesque.⁵⁸

Medical Topographical Aesthetics

The anxious manoeuvre between the picturesque aesthetics of landscape and the material dangers of the tropical climate is echoed in medical treatises. Chisholm reiterates Beckford’s physiognomic metaphor, offering ‘some account of Grenada, as far as relates to the face of the country, its productions, its diseases, and the state of the weather’.⁵⁹ While Beckford starts his Descriptive Account with the empirical data of Jamaica’s plantations, slaves and roads, however, Chisholm’s introduction makes the reverse move by beginning with scenes of natural beauty. Describing the coastline of Grenada, Chisholm adjoins topographical detail to a vision of colonial landscape as ‘ornament’:

Chisholm’s Miltonic ‘woody theatre, of stateliest view’ stages the Grenadian landscape for a European eye, adding picturesque enhancements to its rough beauty: the cane fields are ‘diversified’ by ‘irregular’ and ‘romantic’ groups of slave huts, while ‘in many places the scene is enlivened by cascades’.⁶¹ In his medical epistolary collection Notes on the West Indies (1806), George Pinckard, a military physician in Barbados in the 1790s, describes a similarly aestheticized view as he sails into Carlisle Bay:

Pinckard views his new surroundings as if from above, and this floating eye oversees the ‘picture’ of a slave-run plantation, identifying the distancing and staging effects of this colonial picturesque mode: ‘the whole island, encircled by the Atlantic ocean, was under the eye, displaying a scene’.⁶³ Physician John Williamson begins his narrative of colonial arrival in a similar tone: ‘the approach to Barbados presented a kind of scenery to my view with which it had never been entertained … The lofty cocoa-nut trees, with their green covered tops, wafting with the winds, added greatly to the distant view of grandeur which the young European first contemplates of a West India island’.⁶⁴ Williamson’s ‘distant view’ indicates the role of imperial fantasy in this scenery, as the ‘young European’ is met by sights he has imagined into existence long before ever setting foot in the Caribbean.⁶⁵ For Williamson’s Barbados, as for Beckford’s Jamaica, the island’s ‘extreme beauty and luxuriance’ is ‘beyond the powers of description’.⁶⁶

The picturesque vistas painted by these three medical authors, however, soon give way to another view. Pinckard’s senses are overwhelmed by the ‘congregated disease, crowded suffering, and accumulated wretchedness’ which are ‘spectacles common to the eyes of medical men’, as the ‘spectacle’ of disease and death, rather than that of picturesque landscape, becomes the new point of focus.⁶⁷ As the aesthetic eye is transformed into the medical eye, the distressing scenes to which Pinckard bears witness are attributed to the tropical environment. It is ‘lamentable and surprising’, he writes, that people ‘prefer the convenience of commerce to the more important advantages of health, and fix their habitations, as if it were expressly, upon the most unhealthy points of the globe’.⁶⁸ Similarly, Chisholm’s and Williamson’s picturesque perspectives shift seamlessly into environmental diagnostics. Chisholm stresses the geographical causes of disease: ‘hepatic and pulmonary inflammations are more frequent, and more violent in these rugged mountainous islands [of Grenada] than in Barbadoes, Antigua, and others of a smoother and less divided surface’.⁶⁹ In comparison to Grenada’s mountainous landscape, Williamson describes the flatter landscape of Bridgetown, Barbados, as ‘a low and moist situation’ – a geography which he claims harbours the agents of elephantiasis.⁷⁰

Noxious land spaces might be recuperated, however. Joseph Priestley’s hope that bad airs might be cleansed of their toxic agents was particularly significant in the colonies, where European agriculture was perceived as helping unhealthy tropical environments by clearing up noxious land spaces such as marshes and woodland. The improving work of agriculture combined health concerns with aesthetic appreciation. For Williamson, the pleasing ‘aspect’ of particular regions of Jamaica is clearly tied to their ‘state of cultivation’.⁷¹ Chisholm’s picturesque scenery sets the stage for his medical argument that contagious disease in the tropics is caused by ‘the most unpardonable neglect of cleanliness, and the retention of contagious effluvia from a total want of ventilation’.⁷² His fear that the most attractive landscapes might also be the most ridden with disease, though, suggests that beauty can also disguise disease. The synthesis of aspect and improvement originates in the paradoxical desire of the picturesque traveller to explore an untouched natural world, while imaginatively enhancing it. Like Beckford, though, Williamson’s idealization of agricultural improvement is also a way of voicing his ameliorationist politics. Hitching social improvement to environmental improvement, Williamson writes equally keenly on the willingness with which the Jamaican authorities have taken it upon themselves to ‘instruct and improve the condition of the slaves’.⁷³ While the domestic picturesque eye is often understood to be motivated by a desire to add the finishing touches and thereby render nature scenic, in the tropical colonies ‘improvement’ was underpinned by a host of other medical and political concerns. By framing their improvement narratives in terms of artistic vision, medical geographers emphasized the potential for the Caribbean to be remade not only as healthier, but also as a more habitable and socially stable space.

Pinpointing diseases in specific climatic and topographical locations, colonial authors created topographies which invited readers to position themselves both aesthetically and medically in relation to the colonial Caribbean. The textual movement from the aesthetic observation of landscape to the medical argument that certain diseases are endemic to that landscape characterizes medical geography of the period. By situating medical descriptions within an aesthetic frame, physicians and surgeons appropriated for medical use the morally and visually distanced eye of the picturesque, constructing a visual scene suggestive of the desired objectivity of medical discourse. A key implication of Enlightenment descriptive practice, as Bender and Marrinan write in Regimes of Description, is ‘the utopian idea that knowledge is stable and generally impervious to the vicissitudes of time’.⁷⁴ The Newtonian drive to arrive at scientific universals underpinned this model of natural knowledge, which also owed much to the immense quantities of information wrought by colonial travel. The stability of knowledge, as well as the stability of landscape, lay the conceptual groundwork for the claim that a particular region was inherently diseased. Medical geography and topography combine description with an aesthetic viewpoint that surveys colonial land from above and afar, lending an impression of unity and presenting the landscape as static and immobile, with the suggestion of a stable perspective on an unstable environment. This creates distance between the physician and landscape – the ‘colonial immunity’ which becomes particularly significant in the writing of colonial physicians and surgeons in imagining their own objectivity and protection from the diseased surroundings which they survey and describe. Finally, the picturesque eye situates medical writing within a narrative of aesthetic and agricultural improvement intended to make tropical land spaces appear healthy and habitable. What is revealed in the aestheticized production of medical knowledge, then, is a strain of colonial picturesque vision as it was mobilized and put to use by medical geographers in representations of the West Indian islands as a set of pathogenic spaces. Medical treatises established geographical knowledge and scientific credibility as much through the visual imagery of landscape and its figurative representation as they did through medical data.

Description, in medical topography, is productive of diagnosis, and it is the details of the surface appearance of land – Chisholm’s loose sand, stagnant waters and low coastline, for example – which indicate its adverse effects on health. Imagining material environments as textual conundrums to be deciphered, the medical geographer describes the characteristics of a landscape in order to develop a causal narrative of disease that pinpoints the origins of illness in geographical space. Colonial picturesque writing makes the same imaginative leap from landscape description to medical conclusion. But the proximity between medical and picturesque topographical detail also reveals precisely what literature announcing itself as ‘descriptive’, such as that by Heriot, Edwards and Beckford, is endeavouring to suppress. For Beckford, the relationship between aesthetic landscape and medical environment, or between description and analysis, breaks down as the inability to fully describe the colonial landscape also acknowledges the limits of description and the epistemological gaps between landscape, representation and interpretation. The purely aesthetic descriptive mode falters – and with it the distinction between the descriptive and the analytical – at the point of intersection between the aesthetics of landscape and the physiological effects of climate, as the colonial observer’s surroundings encroach upon the act of description. The tropical climate is a source of great anxiety – its volatility needs to be transcribed into aesthetic form in order to be imaginatively contained. The effects of this aestheticization, however, are multiple. On the one hand, ‘landscape’ forges a gap between the colonial observer and the surroundings. But the endeavour to describe climate in aesthetic terms is also an attempt to transform ‘climate’ or ‘environment’ into ‘landscape’, rendering the invisible visible and thereby bringing the dangers of climate closer to the observing eye.⁷⁵ The mapping of a medical rhetoric of climate or environment onto the colonial aesthetics of landscape creates a tension between landscape as a static visual entity and spatial environment as a mobile and interactive set of surroundings.

‘A Change of Air and Place’

This chapter began with Heriot’s celebration of the ‘more various, more abundant’ Caribbean landscape, quickly followed by his despair at what lies beneath the luxurious, fertile tropical surroundings. Aesthetic pleasure in the ‘copious, rude variety’ of tropical nature is shared by other accounts of the sugar colonies, and draws on the picturesque visual model which emphasized irregularity and gradations of light and shade in the display of improved and idealized landscapes.⁷⁶ In the colonies, the potential for improvement helped Europeans imaginatively to frame the differences between Europe and the West Indies and the agricultural and environmental improvements that might be made to noxious tropical spaces. Beckford’s picturesque eye, too, feasts on the ‘infinite and pleasing variety’to be found in Jamaica’s natural environment and presents it in terms of an imaginative invitation to ‘improvement’.⁷⁷ On his departure from Jamaica, Beckford wishes that William Mason, gardener and author of the long poem The English Garden (1772–81), might compose a georgic on Jamaica’s landscape, a subject more ‘open to genius’ than England’s. While English landscapes might be ‘pleasing’, ‘tranquil’ and ‘refined’, a Jamaican georgic would accommodate the West Indian ‘sublimities of inundations, the effects of thunder, and the dread of storms’. It would also present the opportunity for a sentimental aesthetics allied to Beckford’s ameliorationist standpoint: to ‘weep with the afflicted, and to rejoice at the punishment of tyrants’.⁷⁸ As the sublime imagery of the tropical storm suggests, variety is not only an aesthetic category for Beckford. In the comparison between Jamaica and other climates, visual variety is allied to meteorological change:

Weather phenomena become objects of visual interest, and Beckford urges the traveller to Jamaica to take ‘pleasure in the beautiful varieties of vapours and fogs’.⁸⁰ In the West Indies, one person’s pleasing cloud, fog or vapour might be another’s life-threatening miasma, but Beckford is careful to imagine a healthy colonial sky. Much like the topographer’s record of changes in meteorological conditions – and prefiguring John Constable’s ‘change of weather and effect’ that would become a central precept of landscape aesthetics – Beckford records and aestheticizes the fluctuating tropical climate.⁸¹ Weather, here, serves as a visual frame for colonial landscape imagery and defines the conceptual separation between the sublime volatility of Caribbean weather and the mildness of England – which ‘can hardly vie with that of Jamaica for seven, eight, nine months in the year’.⁸²

The ‘change of weather and effect’ was also an important precept of medical theory, according to which a change of air was considered beneficial to the health, and fostered the rise in medical tourism. In Barbados, George Pinckard recommends the benefits of a ‘change of air and place’ for patients convalescing from fevers.⁸³ Chisholm, too, prescribes a ‘change of air and situation’ to speed up the recovery from malignant pestilential fever.⁸⁴ In Williamson’s Jamaica, ‘much variety of climate is afforded for the benefit of sick and convalescents: and, where a temperate air is enjoyed, untainted by those sources of disease which we understand so greatly abound in Jamaica, it is a blessing which cannot be too highly estimated’.⁸⁵ Aerial changes were not always viewed in a positive light, however. Authority on colonial meteorology William Hillary had earlier written that ‘the variations of the Air’ in the West Indies were more likely to cause disease, and that Africans and African-Caribbeans were subject to more ‘frequent and epidemical’ illnesses with greater changes in the air.⁸⁶ Chisholm, following Hillary’s influential meteorological model, ascribes certain climatic diseases to the particular topography of Grenada, where the ‘windings of the innumerable hills … produce a change of temperature every hundred yards’. Being one moment ‘bathed in the most profuse sweat’ and the next ‘suddenly exposed to the prevailing winds’ has an immediate adverse effect: ‘the body is in an instant dried up’, creating an ‘aguish sensation’ that is followed by ‘topical pains and inflammations of a most dangerous nature’.⁸⁷ Aerial variety, in this case, means that some types of inflammatory disease occur more frequently in Grenada than in the flatter islands such as Antigua or Barbados.⁸⁸ Here, Chisholm aligns aesthetic variety with ill-health, with the picturesque ‘windings’ of the Grenadian hills harbouring potentially deadly disease.

Variety is also a key theme for Heriot. The great vegetable abundance of the West Indies is attributed to the lack of seasonal change: because ‘no frost consolidates the purling springs’, Heriot writes, ‘Vegetation’s ever active power / Sends forth, with rapid growth, herbs, plants, and trees, / For various virtues, various uses form’d.’⁸⁹ While Heriot celebrates the variety of plant life, which makes for vital and luxurious tropical imagery, the poem’s sense of meteorological variety is more conflicted. The ‘direful vicissitude’ of the West Indian storm brings financial and social destruction, as tropical winds

But while the winds leave ruin in their wake, the ‘beauteous, variegated figures’ of the storm clouds herald the medical benefits of sudden meteorological change in the healthful effects of fresh winds and rain that wash away the disease-spreading particles carried in stale airs, ‘Wasting quick, / The noxious, fetid parts’ and work to ‘render the air / Again salubrious’.⁹¹ Like Heriot, Beckford indicates a conflicted sense of the relationship between changes in the potent tropical airs and disease. Viewing the scene from a Jamaican mountain top, he writes:

Here, the observer is both delighted and frustrated by his viewing experience. The parenthetical separation of the paradoxical idea that the north wind is restorative to the sick, but injurious to the healthy, annexes Beckford’s health concerns from his aesthetic vision without fully detaching the two themes. The transcendent eye is endangered by the airs which bring both aesthetic pleasure and the threat of illness. While in the medical geographical accounts by Pinckard and Williamson the aesthetic functions imaginatively to map out the terrain of disease, Beckford’s alignment of the ‘variety’ afforded by the wind with medical variations and the variation of visual perspective suggests the closer connection between aesthetics and illness that Chisholm points to in his claim that the most beautiful Grenadian landscapes are also the most deadly. For Beckford, the north wind makes Jamaica more beautiful, but also more dangerous. Similarly, for Chisholm the most ‘picturesque’ and ‘ornamental’ parts of Grenada are associated with the corruptive airs that endanger the health of visitors.⁹³ The role of vision as a primary human faculty gave the credence of common sense to environmental models that rendered pathogenic qualities available to sight. Beckford and Chisholm, however, appear to turn this assumption on its head and indicate the negative association between beauty and health, suggesting the conceptual problems attendant on their proximity within the panoptic vision of medico-geographical aesthetics which renders environmental phenomena that exist on the cusp of the invisible – winds, clouds, miasmata – visible. While Pinckard and Williamson make use of a picturesque vantage point to maintain a safe distance between themselves and the unhealthy landscapes they survey, Beckford’s Descriptive Account exhibits a more problematic relationship between aesthetics, disease and landscape. For Beckford, that which renders landscape pleasing to the eye can actually be injurious to health.

Colonial Gothic

The picturesque endeavour to improve landscape imaginatively was allied to the medical geographical aspiration to improve unhealthy spaces through agriculture and other kinds of cultivation. That hope faded in the early decades of the nineteenth century. In 1764, Grainger had placed great emphasis on the possibility of Africans and Europeans becoming ‘seasoned’ to new environments. By 1812, colonial surgeon James Johnson voiced growing pessimism about the possibility of Europeans successfully adapting to life in tropical climates. Johnson denied that humans shared the ability of animals to adjust to new environments, and it was this idea that came to dominate nineteenth-century medical opinion: ‘the plan of seasoning troops against yellow fever’, Johnson writes, ‘has completely failed’. Accusing those doctors who have ‘theorised widely on a foundation which the foregoing facts completely overturn’ of trusting speculative knowledge rather than empirical evidence, Johnson claims that they ‘probably took the doctrine from Dr. [Benjamin] Moseley, who tells us that a seasoning at Bermudas will secure us from the yellow fever of the West Indies … Let no such plan be trusted.’⁹⁴ By the 1830s hopes of acclimatization and large-scale European settlement throughout the East and West Indies had largely evaporated.⁹⁵

Those fading hopes are tangible not only in medical discourse but also in the changing perspectives brought by abolition. The sense of environmental disease as haunting colonial landscapes was increasingly brought to the fore with the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. The dangers of tropical climates resonate profoundly in the writing of the Scots abolitionist poet and hymn writer James Montgomery. Montgomery’s father was a Moravian minister, and in 1783 his parents travelled as missionaries to Barbados, where they both later died. Montgomery was involved in radical political activism in Sheffield, and was a prolific author, writing poetry, hymns, reviews and essays. The publication of The Wanderer of Switzerland and other Poems (1806) put Montgomery on the national scene – Scott and Southey both praised the work and Byron wrote that The Wanderer was ‘worth more than a thousand Lyrical Ballads’.⁹⁶ While The Wanderer voices concerns about the dangers posed by the French Revolution to the British populace and interests, several of Montgomery’s other works focus on the anti-slavery movement, and on the efforts of missionaries in the Americas to convert slaves to Christianity. After the success of The Wanderer, Montgomery was commissioned by the printer Robert Bowyer to write a poem on the subject of the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. On the poem’s first appearance in Bowyer’s volume it failed to capture the public imagination, but when published separately in 1810 it achieved considerable popularity. The poem celebrates the liberation of Africa from the terror of the slave ship – ‘Thy chains are broken, Africa, be free!’ – while lamenting the continuation of slavery in the West Indies.⁹⁷ Charting the history of the European colonization of the Americas, Montgomery describes Columbus’s first landing, battles between the British and Spanish empires over land ownership and the death of the indigenous peoples. ‘Give me to sing’, writes Montgomery, ‘in melancholy strains, / Of Charib martyrdoms and negro chains’.⁹⁸ The pre-colonial Caribbean, the ‘Eden-islands of the West, / In floral pomp, and verdant beauty drest’, has been destroyed by imperial exploitation.⁹⁹ Imagining yellow fever – the disease which ‘spares the poor slave, and smites the haughty lord’ – as the righteous punishment for the suffering inflicted upon enslaved Africans, the poem uses heroic couplets and images of disease and death in building a sense of ecological and moral crisis into its condemnation of colonial slavery, the agricultural abuse of the islands and the physical abuse of slaves by the planter class.¹⁰⁰ While for slavery apologists like James Grainger the sugarcane is celebrated as a symbol of agricultural and economic triumph, here the plant features as the source of environmental and social decay:

In the context of the medico-geographical impetus toward agricultural ‘improvement’ to clean up noxious tropical land spaces, the description of the cane’s ‘ingrafting’ onto the land lends a sense of ecological misuse. Echoing Grainger’s earlier criticisms of colonial agricultural and forestry practice, here Montgomery combines his anti-slavery message with environmentalism. His anxieties over the dangers of the mass import of foreign plants were well founded: the sugar monoculture wrought environmental havoc on the Caribbean by decreasing soil fertility and dramatically increasing the insect population which fed on the cane. The concentration of people, plants and animals in the lowland tropical areas used for sugar plantations harboured a multitude of new pathogens. Montgomery draws on medical geographical language to warn that the ‘pestilent decay’ of European imperialism has brought the Caribbean environment to the brink of collapse. The ‘sepulchral vapours’ of the socially and environmentally corrupt plantation create an air that is ‘one tremendous uproar of despair’, and the once-untouched landscape is now glutted with pestilent humans: ‘Captives of tyrant power and dastard wiles, / Dispeopled Africa, and gorged the isles.’¹⁰² Montgomery’s rejection of European agricultural ‘improvement’ sacralizes pre-colonial nature, identifies slavery as a social evil so toxic that it infects the earth and expresses the problem of European imperialism medically and geopolitically.

Montgomery’s identification of the capitalist imperial economy as the cause of environmental disharmony points to the Creole planter as the source of corruption. While Montgomery imagines the slave’s body rotting beneath the ground, the body of the planter festers over ground: ‘The bloated vampire of a living man; / His frame, – a fungus form, of dunghill birth, / That taints the air, and rots above the earth’.¹⁰³ Imagined as a parasitic demon feeding off the land and labour of others, the planter becomes the origin of disease, and his rancid body the toxic source of environmental and social decay. Tying the agricultural debasement of nature to the planter’s moral depravity, Montgomery’s abolitionist politics are played out here in the idea that plantation slavery and the agricultural misuse of landscape enact a kind of denaturing of the Caribbean environment. Tropical nature is bound up with death, and the idyllic abundance of the ‘wild mountains and luxurious plains’ is haunted by the tormented echoes of Charib martyrs, slave chains and the night-calls of vampiric creatures: ‘At sun-set, when voracious monsters burst / From dreams of blood, awaked by maddening thirst.’¹⁰⁴ While the planter is a decaying, corruptive influence, slave bodies become contaminated too, through the ingestion of the poisoned earth. The reference to geophagy in the African’s ‘earth-devouring anguish of despair’ is clear enough, but Montgomery also includes a footnote.¹⁰⁵ Describing those slaves who ‘in deep and irrecoverable melancholy, waste themselves away, by secretly swallowing large quantities of earth’, Montgomery calls dirt eating an ‘infectious, and even a social malady: plantations have been occasionally almost depopulated, by the slaves, with one consent, betaking themselves to this strange practice, which speedily brings them to a miserable and premature end’.¹⁰⁶ The grim image of the slave eating contaminated earth is matched by the poem’s gothic overtones in its description of plantation society:

The West Indies is depicted as haunted, corrupted and diseased, populated by soulless, greedy plantation owners and thousands of starving and abused slaves suffering under the ‘lingering tortures’ of the overseer’s lash.¹⁰⁸ The Atlantic Ocean, meanwhile, is filled with the ‘wandering ghosts’ of ‘myriads of slaves’ who have perished aboard the overcrowded and disease-ridden slave ships or ‘pestilential barks’ on which they are funnelled across the Middle Passage.¹⁰⁹

Beckford, Chisholm, Heriot, Pinckard and Williamson reveal the mutual significance of geographical medicine and landscape aesthetics, and Montgomery, too, draws on the association between land and colonial disease. In the colonial picturesque, medical aesthetics function to interrupt the imperial gaze and to question the form and possibility of aesthetic sensibility in a tropical setting; or, rather, the movement between the imagery of landscape and a medical discourse of infection, pestilence and miasma means that the ‘natural’ is always also deployed as the ‘medical’. Montgomery’s poem goes further: the medicalizing of nature and of landscape structures the sense of ecological rupture or crisis in the sugar colonies which questions the idea of the Caribbean landscape as ‘natural’ at all. Colonial plantations were built upon a foundation of African slave labour, Caribbean climate and European agriculture. This merging of spatial, social and agricultural order is constructed by Montgomery as the denaturing of the Caribbean – a terrible geopolitical hybrid in which the ideologically potent concept of a New World paradise has become polluted and debased. Montgomery’s representation of the sugar islands as corrupted by disease and death rearticulates the landscape imagery of the picturesque in terms of a colonial gothic mode which drew more overtly from the contemporary medical discourse which was by now increasingly pessimistic about the possibility of human adaptation and harmony between Europeans and tropical climates.

Colonial gothic would go through other permutations and be taken up by other authors such as Matthew Lewis, whose classic gothic novel The Monk (1796) and the drama Castle Spectre (1797) would prefigure the record of his time as a planter in Jamaica in 1816 and 1817, Journal of a West-India Proprietor (1834).¹¹⁰ Lewis, like Beckford, frames his ameliorationist position in terms of the cultivating language of the picturesque:

Elizabeth Bohls argues that Lewis’s picturesque is a ‘theatrical’ presentation of colonial imagery, and certainly in this passage tropical landscape becomes the ‘ornamented’ stage for the slave’s performance of African naïveté.¹¹² Like Beckford’s, Lewis’s visual project offers glimpses of the influence of medical geographical discourse, using the aerial medical language of vapours and odours to imagine Jamaica’s climate as part of an Edenic scene:

As Lewis hints here, the airs that carry the sweet scent of tropical flowering trees can just as easily carry toxic gases released from rotting vegetable matter. The moment when the picturesque is interrupted by medical anxieties occurs in one of the verse entries interspersed throughout the Journal, and it is in the textual juxtaposition of the descriptive prose passages and poetic sections that the Journal’s structure highlights the impossibility of completely removing the threat of disease from picturesque plantation scenery. Fearing the ‘terrible ravages’ being committed by yellow fever among the white people of Jamaica, Lewis hopes for health: ‘Let not thy strange diseases prey / On my life; but scare from my couch away / The yellow Plague’s imps; and safe let me rest / From that dread black demon, who racks the breast’.¹¹⁴ D. L. MacDonald argues that the ‘dread black demon’ probably refers to the Black Death – the bubonic plague which was imported to the region via shipboard rats. Given that this black fiend ‘racks the breast’, however (rather than leaving black spots on the skin), it may invoke the black vomit that was understood to be a symptom of the final, fatal stages of yellow fever, described by Colin Chisholm as resembling coffee grounds.¹¹⁵ Lewis’s anxieties about yellow fever were well founded: he died of the disease aboard ship on his return journey from Jamaica in 1818. The gothic sensibility annexed to Lewis’s descriptive picturesque finds its full fruition in his poem ‘The Isle of Devils: A Metrical Tale’ – apparently written aboard ship on his first passage to Jamaica, but appearing in the Journal between entries on his second voyage to the island. Just as the poetic sections in his earlier work The Monk serve to heighten the novel’s tone of gothic romance, the fantasies of imprisonment, rape and murder in ‘The Isle of Devils’ haunt the picturesque fantasy of Lewis’s Journal. The poem is a nightmare of monstrosity and miscegenation run riot: the demon ruler of a remote island rescues a shipwrecked woman from his swarm of monstrous, vampiric dwarfs, but rapes her and eventually murders the two children – one monstrous, one human – she bears as a result. The ‘Tempest-Fiend’s’ black skin, ‘gigantic’ form and unintelligible ‘wild chaunt’ allude both to Caliban and to the African slaves whom Lewis had yet to meet, fictionalizing his colonial encounter as he sails nervously towards it.¹¹⁶ The gothic denaturing of the West Indies in Montgomery’s poem is that which can only be articulated by Lewis in allegorical poetry that displaces the threat of colonial disease from the landscape and into the symbolic figures of demons, imps and blood-thirsty dwarves. By the time of Lewis’s journal, a gothic sensibility, thematically differentiated and formally separated from the picturesque scenery described in his prose entries, has taken over as the literary medium of diseased colonial environments.

Medical Vision

The texts discussed in this chapter reveal the powerful influence of the aesthetic on the colonial medical imagination, the intricate relationship between descriptive and visual language and medical ideas and the medical utility of literary modes of knowledge production. What is positioned here as the medical aesthetics of climate and landscape describes a linguistic exchange between medical geographical science and the aesthetics of colonial spaces as they were constructed in literary texts and travel narratives. As well as the association of illness with colonial climates, the comparisons between medical and other depictions of the Caribbean show that physicians, surgeons, planters and poets drew on a shared language of medicalized landscape aesthetics which informed, and was informed by, discursive exchange between art, landscape gardening, literature and the geographical and medical sciences. The cultural proximity between geography, landscape and health was related to the centrality of sense impressions, primarily vision, to ideas about human health and medical diagnosis. The diagnosis of illness and the desire to contain it physically and imaginatively in the colonies was formulated in a set of medical geographical aesthetics which constituted a method of visual and descriptive control over the tropical Caribbean landscape. Within the medical discourse of climate and geography, the understanding of landscape hinged on a model of beauty, improvement and variety drawn from the literary and artistic language of the picturesque. Medical topography conceived of disease (or, rather, its geographical origins) as visible, and took up the transcendent eye of the aesthetic realm.

For medical practitioners, the continuity between British and Caribbean landscapes enabled by the use of picturesque aesthetics also imaginatively established the authority and credibility of their medical arguments. The lack of published medical cartography in the region may be another reason that medical geography turned to the picturesque aesthetics of landscape in an attempt to materialize visually the sources of aerial disease. By the early 1800s, Dahlia Porter argues, the picturesque had been excised from the new scientific topography being carried out in England, with topographical dictionaries containing very little picturesque description by this period.¹¹⁷ But in the West Indies, the drive to paint an image of colonial health and beauty that could be transported to the metropole as an invitation to the sugar colonies meant that medical and scientific discourse retained its strong connections to the language of the scenic. While Lewis evacuates disease from the picturesque to gothic verse, the association between medical science, topography and landscape aesthetics was still strong in medical writing by the time of emancipation and beyond. Writing in 1854, the physician John Davy, inspector general of army hospitals and brother of Sir Humphry Davy, echoes the alteration of earlier medical authors between scenes of picturesque wonder and medical commentary, as well as the imaginative alignment of aesthetics, climate and health. St Vincent is the most beautiful of the West Indian islands, Davy claims, structured by ‘mountains clad with native forests, sufficiently high to reach the region of the clouds; hills and vallies whether wooded or cultivated, ever verdant; with variety in all, whether mountain, hill, or valley, in form and colouring more than sufficient for picturesque effect’. The island’s idyllic appearance is matched by its excellent climate, ‘rendering it equally favourable to agricultural fertility and success, and with a few exceptions, not less so to the health and comfort of its inhabitants’.¹¹⁸ In Davy’s post-emancipation era the politics of climate and health and the medically purifying effects of the tropical weather are rearticulated to celebrate the end to the evils of slavery. ‘Since the last great hurricane’, Davy writes, ‘there has been a decided improvement in the public health, and especially in that of the planters and their families … What the hurricane did for the physical atmosphere of Barbados, emancipation effected for its moral and domestic atmosphere.’¹¹⁹

The picturesque as described by Tim Fulford and others made landscape a mode of consumption. Associated with the commercialization of rural societies, Fulford describes the picturesque as ‘voyeuristic’, ‘distant’ and ‘static’.¹²⁰ But the colonies could not sustain such a view, and the colonial picturesque strains under the weight of medical anxieties it is unable to suppress. While the dangers of tropical climates and the problems of depicting slavery prompt the turn into the aesthetic as a way of stabilizing landscape, the point of meeting between landscape imagery and the climatic and topographical model afforded by medical geography poses conceptual problems. The power of tropical vegetable life described by Grainger’s organic georgic takes on new associations in the texts discussed here through the agency attributed to the inanimate matter in airs, fogs and vapours which spread disease and which prevent Caribbean environments from being ‘landscaped’. Further, the labour of tropical landscape description rests on an uneasy association between beauty and disease which, because of description’s diagnostic impulse (and as Beckford and Chisholm suggest), can pose a threat, as much as an inspiration, to the colonial observer. Because landscape description locates the writing subject in the diseased tropical environment, the visual impulse finds itself caught in conflict with the fact that rendering landscape visible through the act of description is precisely the source of danger. In a strange displacement of disease from the human body to landscape and its aesthetic representation, the colonial landscape writer (or painter) finds the act of writing or visualization itself to be dangerous. Not only does the beauty of the Caribbean not compensate for its deadly climate, there is even a sense in which that beauty is intrinsically bound up with disease and death. This sense of natural beauty as degraded and degrading affects the tropicalization of the Caribbean in both aesthetic and medical terms. Rather than being a setting or a background, the landscape becomes a kind of toxic agent – not only harbouring the Edenic snake, but itself venomous.

Asserting a claim of mastery over the colonial landscape, writers maintained a safe distance between that landscape and the European self, and constructed a causal medical narrative whereby landscapes were the origin of health or disease. Representations of the colonial landscape are characterized by a textual movement between the description of landscape as a static aesthetic object and a medicalized disease climate as a volatile and threatening set of surroundings. The representation of colonial spaces betrays a struggle between the work of landscape description, which imposes a certain distance between the describer and the described, and a medicalized concept of climatic environment, which constructs the writing subject as bound up in a more complex causal narrative in which they can both act and be acted upon. ‘Landscape’ as an aesthetic unit is interrupted by the medical diagnosis of its visual signifiers and becomes invested with layers of meaning beyond the visual. Colonial landscape description frames space statically, but the attempt to fix landscape through climatic medical knowledge necessitates a causal narrative of disease, threatening both the aesthetic and the writing subject. Whereas landscape militates towards stasis and a measured distance between the ‘eye’ and the thing depicted, medical discussions of environment (which seek to narrate causality) collapse that distance, relocating the body within the space it describes. ‘Nature’ slips between the framing concepts of ‘landscape’ and ‘climate’ or ‘environment’, collapsing the opposition between them. As the meeting of medical language and colonial landscape imagery maps a causal narrative of environment onto the pictorial codes of landscape description, this medicalized aesthetics of landscape undermines the possibility of the desired pure aesthetic of textual and visual forms such as the picturesque.

The tropical cloud – or, fog, vapour or miasma – epitomizes this complicated relationship between landscape and climate. Clouds are the pinnacle of picturesque natural ‘variety’: able to take on an infinite number of shapes, they are ephemeral, itinerant, mobile. An object of keen Romantic observation, not only are clouds ‘various’ in their form, but their chaos and shapelessness also produce what Mary Jacobus calls an ‘aesthetic of indeterminacy’.¹²¹ ‘Clouds are confusing’, Jacobus writes, because they ‘mysteriously combine visibility and volume without surface’ and ‘challenge the phenomenology of the visible with what cannot be seen.’¹²² Just as clouds consist of individually ‘invisible’ water droplets, miasmas consist of roving disease particles – invisible but deadly. The ambiguous distinction between a cloud and a disease-spreading miasma mirrors the relationship between picturesque imagery and medical diagnosis, as well as the blurring of the boundaries between ‘landscape’ and ‘climate’ and aesthetics and health. In terms of the focus on description as a primary mode of colonial knowledge production, tropical clouds mark the struggle to describe geographical and meteorological phenomena accurately and aesthetically and bring home the medical and aesthetic problems extending from the beautiful but deadly and tempestuous ‘change of weather and effect’ in the West Indies.