Stephen Snelders

• Ph.D.
• Research Associate at Utrecht University, Faculty of Science

Leprosy and colonialism investigates the history of leprosy in the colony of Suriname in the Dutch Caribbean within the context of colonial power and racial conflict - from the plantation economy and the age of slavery to its legacy in the modern colonial state. The book traces the origins of the modern stigmatization and exclusion of people af...

Ecopiracy from various perspectives

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the Dutch started to modernize their empire and attempted to build ‘modern colonial states’ in their territories in the East Indies (present-day Indonesia) and West Indies (Suriname/Dutch Guiana, and the Dutch Caribbean islands). The endemic presence of certain diseases and behaviours was felt to threat...

The first collection of its kind to explore the diverse and global history of psychedelics as they appealed to several generations of researchers and thinkers. Expanding Mindscapes offers a fascinatingly fluid and diverse history of psychedelics that stretches around the globe. While much of the literature to date has focused on the history of thes...

Why did the international drug regulatory regime of the twentieth century fail to stop an explosive increase in trade and consumption of illegal drugs? This study investigates the histories of smugglers and criminal entrepreneurs in the Netherlands who succeeded in turning the country into the so-called ‘Colombia of Europe’ or, ‘the international d...

Hallucinogens have a long history as therapeutic agents. After the synthesis of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1938 by Albert Hofmann, the popularity of classical hallucinogens with psychedelic properties increased among scientists, psychiatrists, neurologists, and psychotherapists. Research in the 1950s and 1960s showed great promise for the...

This article questions the normalisation of tobacco use in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. The investigation shows that our present cultural ambivalence towards the intoxicant goes back to tobacco’s early introduction. The integration of tobacco use as an essential element in social rituals was situated on a line from general acceptance to...

Cannabis consumption, commerce, and control in global history, from the nineteenth century to the present day. This book gathers together authors from the new wave of cannabis histories that has emerged in recent decades. It offers case studies from Africa, Asia, the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. It does so to trace a global history of the...

Research perspectives in the Anthropocene: challenges for a green criminology This essay discusses green criminology in relation to the development of non-anthropocentric research perspectives in history and cultural anthropology. Green criminological concepts of ‘environmental harm’ and ‘ecocide’ turn doing harm to nature and ecosystems, even when...

Why did the international drug regulatory regime of the twentieth century fail to stop an explosive increase in trade and consumption of illegal drugs? This study investigates the histories of smugglers and criminal entrepreneurs in the Netherlands who succeeded in turning the country into the so-called ‘Colombia of Europe’ or the ‘international dr...

Drug Use, Excess, and Criminality: A Historical Perspective This article discusses the problem of excessive drug use from a historical perspective. Cultural ambivalence towards excessive use of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs has roots going back into the seventeenth century. A case study is presented of the introduction and adaptation of tobacco in th...

Background: lsd and other hallucinogens or psychedelics have been therapeutically used in psychiatry in the period between the Second World War and the late 1980s. In the past years renewed interest in the medical sciences for research and therapeutic use of these substances has evolved. AIM: A discussion of contemporary lsd research in the contex...

This article is looking at colonial governance with regard to leprosy, comparing two settings of the Dutch colonial empire: Suriname and the Dutch East Indies. Whereas segregation became formal policy in Suriname, leprosy sufferers were hardly ever segregated in the Dutch East Indies. We argue that the perceived needs to maintain a healthy labour f...

A new synthesis in an entry in the dictionary

Human language technology developed and used in CLARIN demonstrator projects WAHSPand BILAND supports advanced forms of (multi-lingual) text mining of large datasets of newspapers. We argue that the combination of exploratory search and text mining o􀀀ers an innovative research approach to systematically set up search trails in the historical scienc...

The Batavia leprosy asylum served to segregate the poor and the slaves among the Surinamese leprosy sufferers. Here the colonial government entered into a working relationship with the Catholic Church, in which the church had an essential role in maintaining some kind of moral and social order in the asylum. The Church was also allowed to use the a...

This chapter examines leprosy politics in the age of slavery reading the sources from a bottom-up perspective: that of the slaves. The chapter examines the slaves’ own belief systems about leprosy, including a spiritual perspective that radically differed from the European medical perspective. Slaves had their own healers and treatments for leprosy...

Leprosy became a visible problem among African slaves in Suriname in the 1750s, and seemed to threaten to return to Europe. This chapter argues that, driven by the needs and interest of Surinamese slave society and economy, Dutch colonial medicine framed the disease with negative connotations: originating among slaves in Africa, caused by unhealthy...

The exclusion of leprosy sufferers in Suriname began to resemble a ‘Great Confinement’ in the period from 1830 and 1860. Close to one of every one hundred inhabitants of the colony was condemned or suspected of having leprosy or elephantiasis, confined to the Batavia leprosy asylum, or segregated at home or elsewhere. The leprosy asylum did not fun...

The on-going adherence of the Afro-Surinamese and of new British Indian and Javanese migrants to their own folk beliefs and practices necessitated a response from Dutch colonial medicine. If modern leprosy politics were to succeed, some degree of cooperation and compliance from the population was necessary. Folk beliefs were not seen as a possible...

This chapter examines Dutch debates about leprosy between 1863 and 1890. The debates took place when the threat of a ‘return’ of leprosy to the Netherlands appeared to materialise. While Dutch policy makers and doctors had to call upon medical expertise from Suriname, at the same time European medicine questioned the validity of a contagionist theo...

For Caribbean plantation economies to function and prosper, European colonizers needed Others – African slaves. In Empire , Michael Hardt and Toni Negri write about this production of Others, the creation of racial boundaries, and the dark Other as the negative component of European identity as well as the economic foundation of European economic s...

Fears of leprosy as an ‘imperial danger’ spread globally after 1890. These coincided with a reorganization of leprosy care in Suriname. However, this reorganization had a dynamic of its own tied to the heritage of Surinamese confinement policies and the necessity for an accommodation between the dominant Christian religious groups in the colony (Pr...

This chapter discusses 20 th -century leprosy politics in Suriname in the context of a modernizing colonial state and in an era of ‘authoritarian high modernism’. Modern leprosy politics were a Janus head. On the one side, the politics were based on the latest developments and fashion in medical views on leprosy: sufferers should be treated as pati...

This chapter explores the modern leprosy asylums in Suriname. In the modern Catholic and Protestant asylums of Majella and Bethesda Christian missionaries gave leprosy care a central place in their activities and in the presentation of these activities to their co-religionists and financiers in Europe. Together with the Groot-Chatillon state asylum...

The genomics revolution of the early twenty-first century has stimulated the need for new appraisals of the risks of genetic discrimination in health care. Historical memories of genetic discrimination have raised serious concerns of the misuse of genetic information in the doctoring of patients. This has led to political action such as federal leg...

Leprosy and colonialism investigates the history of leprosy in the colony of Suriname in the Dutch Caribbean within the context of colonial power and racial conflict - from the plantation economy and the age of slavery to its legacy in the modern colonial state. The book traces the origins of the modern stigmatization and exclusion of people affect...

Aan de hand van de ontwikkeling en invloed van een zogenaamd ‘West-Indisch lepra-conta- gionisme’ zullen wij in dit artikel laten zien dat de vertaalslag van medisch-wetenschappelijke noties en concepten naar beleid en voorschriften (mede) bepaald wordt door andere dan medisch inhoudelijke factoren. Volgens de Amerikaanse historicus Baldwin bestaat...

G.Th.A. Calkoen, Onder studenten. Leidse aanstaande medici en de metamorfose van de geneeskunde in de negentiende eeuw (1838-1888) (Dissertatie Leiden 2012; Leiden: Ginkgo, 2012, 732 pp., ISBN 978 90 71256 20 2); G.Th.A. Calkoen, Hector Treub (1856-1920) (Leiden: Ginkgo, 2013, 36 pp., ISBN 978 90 71256 23 3); H.J. Klasen, De chirurgische wondbehand...

The end of the 1970s was a watershed in the history of illicit drug use in Britain. Fears of drug abuse were already mounting in the 1960s and early 1970s. But they seem to be of a different nature than the concerns about the explosion of an illegal heroin trade and of the estimated number of heroin users—two thousand in 1977, one hundred thousand...

Martinus Antonie van Andel (1878–1941) en de volksgeneeskunde: ‘Lost in Translation’?

In the 1960s and 1970s, politically conscious drug users considered themselves as the new ‘lepers’ or ‘witches’, As those groups had been stigmatised and persecuted in the Middle Ages, the users claimed, in modern times they themselves were subjected to similar processes. They were labeled as bad citizens and their drug uses criminalised as social...

The skin disease boasie became a major health problem in the Dutch colony of Suriname from the 1740s–1750s onwards. European doctors attempted to come to a closer understanding of the disease, and established that it was identical to the leprosy of Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Prussian surgeon and medical doctor Godfried Wilhelm Schilling (c....

https://www.gewina-studium.nl/articles/10.18352/studium.9430/

The epidemic of serious drug safety problems (e.g., Seroxat/Paxil [paroxetine], Vioxx [rofecoxib], Redux [dexfenfluramide] or Ambien [zolpidem]) in the first decade of the twenty-first century has led to public debate on the integrity of the pharmaceutical industry and the effectiveness of drug regulation (Healy, 2004; Moynihan & Cassels, 2005; Ano...

The availability of digitized collections of historical data, such as newspapers, increases every day. With that, so does the wish for historians to explore these collections. Methods that are traditionally used to examine a collection do not scale up to today’s collection sizes. We propose a method that combines text mining with exploratory search...

SUMMARY FREEBOOTERS OF MEDICINE Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION In this chapter the ‘adventurer-scientist’ is introduced. The chapter starts with German natural scientist Georg Marcgraf, finding himself in 1638 among the ‘cannibalistic’ Tapuya Indians of Brazil. At the siege of Portuguese-held Bahia the Dutch soldiers are plagued by diarrhea and dysenter...

‘Piracy of kowledge’ – the role of a buccaneer-scientist in the knowledge circulation around diseases and drugs in the tropics Knowledge circulation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not only stimulated by the mutual interaction of trade and science. In the context of territorial expansion, war, and the activities of privateers and pi...

According to ongoing historical research, standardizing the production and consumption of psychotropic drugs is a process fraught with contradictions and inconsistencies. Both the construction and change of drug standards can be highly unsettling events and do not necessarily lead to more order. The balance between order and disorder appears to be...

This article is an analysis of the use of Pervitin (metamphetamine) in National Socialist Germany after the introduction of the drug in 1938. Whereas earlier studies have focused on the supply of the drug, this study focuses on demand. Both an iatrogenic and a 'Nazigenic' interpretation of the history of metamphetamine use are reviewed. It is concl...

The Dutch expansion into tropical climates, starting in the 1590s, posed practical problems of prevention and therapy for the doctors and surgeons of the trading companies (the Dutch West India Company (WIC) and the Dutch East India Company (VOC)). The first specialised manual on tropical medicine was published in Dutch in 1694. It presented inform...

Genetic knowledge and technologies are rapidly advancing. In order to translate this knowledge into public health interventions, it is essential to assess stakeholders' understanding, attitudes, and views. In this study we explored the views of 26 Dutch (former) Address correspondence to Professor Frans J. Meijman, VU Uni-versity Medical Center, Me...

The making and taking of psychotropic drugs, whether on medical prescription or as self-medication, whether marketed by pharmaceutical companies or clamoured for by an anxious population, has been an integral part of the twentieth century. In this modern era of speed, uncertainty, pleasure and anguish the boundaries between healing and enhancing th...

Knowledge circulation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not only stimulated by the mutual interaction of trade and science. In the context of territorial expansion, war, and the activities of privateers and pirates, knowledge of diseases and drugs in the tropics was increased as well. An important part in this process was performed by...

Leprosy was highly prevalent among African slaves in the Dutch West Indian colony of Suriname. Largely based on observations in Suriname, Dutch physicians described the aetiology of leprosy in terms of'a substrate' to which all sorts of mixtures of infection, heredity and hygiene contributed ('seed and soil'). This explanatory model with multiple o...

In the Third Reich hereditarian approaches and their eugenic implications seemed to offer possibilities for fundamental progress in the fight against cancer. This did not lead to an exclusive emphasis on genetics in theory or practice. The concept of a hereditary predisposition for cancer, the Krebsdisposition or Krebsbereitschaft, led to flexible...

In the Third Reich hereditarian approaches and their eugenic implications seemed to offer possibilities for fundamental progress in the fight against cancer. This did not lead to an exclusive emphasis on genetics in theory or practice. The concept of a hereditary predisposition for cancer, the Krebs-disposition or Krebsbereitschaft, led to flexible...

Since at least the 18th century doctors have drawn connections between cancer and heredity in the hope of making progress in diagnosis, treatment and opportunities for prevention. From 1910 to 1980, the relationship between cancer and heredity was hardly discussed publicly in the Netherlands. This facilitated the development of models of public pre...

The societal embedding of new (medical) technologies involves not only market success, but also regulation and public acceptance. Cultural enthusiasm about their benefits and social concerns about their risks and dangers are in this respect important. Conceptualizing interactions between product championing, cultural enthusiasm and resistance, the...

This article compares the careers of two families of 20th-century psychotropic drugs, the barbiturates and the benzodiazepines, in five different countries. Both families of drugs were used as so-called hypnotics and sedatives, and later as minor tranquillizers. In addition these drugs were extensively used as self-medication. The careers show a cy...

The consequences of the uses of concepts of heredity in society and health care are not simply determined. This is demonstrated by a study of Dutch National Socialist doctors and biologists in the Second World War. During the German occupation of the Netherlands SS-biologist W.F.H. Stroër (1907-1979) and SS-doctor J.A. van der Hoeven (1912-1998) at...

From the First World War onwards anti-cancer organizations in Europe attempted to spread the message of "Do Not Delay": cancer is curable, if and when early diagnosed. This article reports on a systematic study of sources on cancer health education from the medical and public domains in the Netherlands between 1910 and 1950. Dutch cancer specialist...

This article compares the careers of two psychotropic drugs in Western psychiatry, with a focus on the nineteenth century: Cannabis indica and chloral hydrate. They were used by doctors for similar indications, such as mania, delirium tremens, and what we would now call drug dependence. The two show similar career paths consisting of three phases:...

The memoirs of ship's surgeons that sailed with the Caribbean buccaneers and pirates of the 17th century are an important source of information on how they lived and worked. The surgeons enjoyed a full-fledged position among the egalitarian buccaneers. Known buccaneer surgeons whose memoirs have been preserved were apparently not entirely qualified...

Elof AxelCarlson, Mendel's legacy: the origin of classical genetics, Cold Spring Harbor, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2004, pp. xix, 332, illus., US$45.00 (hardback 0-87969-675-3). - Volume 49 Issue 3 - Stephen Snelders

On the basis of a review of the historiography on thought about hereditary transmission and human genetics in the 20th century in Britain, the United States, Germany, Russia, Sweden, and the Netherlands, a new research perspective is formulated. Concepts of heredity and their use in society have been various and diverse. Definitions of heredity and...

Inleiding: de drugs Druggebruik, het niet-medische gebruik van bepaalde chemische stoffen (plantaardig of synthetisch) om hun psychoactieve, de geest beïnvloedende eigenschappen, is iets van alle tijden en van alle culturen. We treffen drugs aan onder de coca kauwende landarbeiders in Zuid-Amerika en de heroïne spuiten-de junks op de Amsterdamse Ni...

Publieke debatten over de humane genetica en de mogelijke gevolgen van de 'genetisering' van gezondheid en ziekte worden gevoerd in de 'schaduw van de eugenetica'. In de debatten, zoals in elk debat rondom wetenschap, technologie, en geneeskunde, schuilt een discussie over betekenissen van ontwikkelingen.' Hierbij wordt veelvuldig gebruik gemaakt v...