Curing the colonizers: highland hydrotherapy in Guadeloupe

This article explores attempts by French colonial doctors in Guadeloupe to treat tropical pathologies with water and altitude cures, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Assuming that high morbidity rates in the Caribbean were caused by the area's inherent 'toxicity', Europeans turned to mineral water and high-altitude spas, both for the reinvigoration of settlers and to 'season' new arrivals. Guadeloupean spas, though utilized by indigenous, black, creole, and white Guadeloupeans alike, soon emerged as replicas of France in the tropics, and served the socio-medical function of immersing the colonial body in familiar waters. The French obsession with 'healthful space' led to the creation of an 'administrative' quarter precisely in the region of Guadeloupe's spas around Basse- Terre (actually the highest part of the island). The arrival of germ theory in the nineteenth century did not fundamentally alter the rationale for water and altitude cures in Guadeloupe. Tracing the history of these 'folk-cures'--often admonished by colonial doctors as 'common sense', but in reality an integral part of the tropical medical canon--sheds light on some of the underlying dynamics, tensions, and continuities of French imperial medicine.