In Part 4 of the Reading Bodies takeover, Rocío Rødtjer discusses the colonial legacies of nineteenth-century medical metaphors and demonstrates their ongoing relevance for the present day.
As part of the project “Reading Bodies: Narrating Illness in Spanish and European Literatures and Cultures (1870s to 1960s),” I examine how Darwinism was portrayed in the Spanish press in the second half of the nineteenth century. Not just a scientific theory, the texts selected show how Darwinism soon became seen as a dangerous British export that corrupted minds and bodies like a disease. Revisiting these historical narratives of illness can therefore help us grasp our current political panorama as similar dynamics seem to be at play, particularly when it comes to understanding an apparent return to imperialism. The last two decades have witnessed the resurgence of imperialist interventions and protectionist policies within a rapidly globalizing yet increasingly fragmented world economy. Notable examples include Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its later invasion of Ukraine to restore the previous borders of the Soviet Union, or the current trade war that has seen a significant hike in import tariffs in the US.
This has led historians Andrew R. Novo (2022) and Samir Puri (2020) to argue that these geopolitical trends echo the territorial rivalries that characterized the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and which culminated calamitously in the First World War. Dubbed “New Imperialism,” the period saw the West engage in territorial expansion into Africa, Asia and the Pacific, driven by technological advancement and justified as a “civilizing mission.” Often scientific language was invoked to legitimize this imperialist impulse. Notably, the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin were distorted into social Darwinism and other dubious excuses for the alleged superiority of the white man and his right to subjugate other races.
As I discuss in the Reading Bodies special issue (Roedtjer 2025), Darwin himself was no stranger to unconscious bias. In The Descent of Man (1871), he depicts a Spain in the throes of decadence, lagging behind other Western powers, and he ultimately blames Catholicism for forestalling any scientific progress (cited in Bell 2006, 113). This alleged hostility towards innovation has been invoked and propagated by colonial – mainly Protestant – rivals since the conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth century. In reaction, Spanish writers pathologized Darwinism as British colonial degeneration, conjuring images of disease and contagion to discredit an imperial rival.
We find these medical metaphors in texts such as “Hombres y animales” [Men and Animals] by the Spanish writer Carlos Coello and “Gestas o el idioma de los monos” [Gestas or The Language of Monkeys] by his compatriot José Fernández Bremón. Both feature mad scientists who blur the boundaries between humans and animals, resulting in unsettling hybrids, like talking dogs and typing monkeys, which trigger fears of reverting to an earlier primal stage. “Hombres y animales” follows the English naturalist Sir James Lowe, Marquis of Holywell, who Coello modelled on his real-life counterpart Charles Darwin. Sir James reaches new lows and ultimately loses his sanity when he decides to turn a dog into a human.
Similarly, “Gestas or The Language of Monkeys” introduces us to an orangutan named Gestas, whose propensity for aping human behaviour leads the ambitious speech tutor Don Crisóstomo to fashion him into a model gentleman. But like “Hombres y animales,” this muddling of species, mixing humans and animals, ends in madness and disaster. In this way, evolutionary theory transcended its scientific roots and became a surrogate for a godless British mercantilism that threatened morality. Darwinism was reimagined as a sickness that affected body and mind, showing how culture borrowed from medical language to incite emotions of fear and suspicion.
Colonialism and commerce
These texts are from the closing decades of the 1800s, but as Samir Puri argues in The Great Imperial Hangover: How Empires Have Shaped the World (2020), colonialist logic remains. When it comes to how colonialism colours global health policies, one needs only to think of the most recent global pandemic and how discussions on the origins of Covid occasionally descended into feverish speculation about the unholy crossing of species, either in an animal market or by misguided lab workers in a research facility. The virus seemingly originated in China, a country viewed as the most direct rival to US hegemony. Economists have been tracking the rise of protectionism that has characterized the relationship between the two countries for years now, and which intensified during Covid with the ensuing supply chain disruptions (Park 2025, Ma & Ning 2025). The pandemic foregrounded vulnerabilities in global markets that caused many countries to prioritize domestic production to reduce reliance on foreign manufacturing, echoing the disruptions to trade caused by Yellow Fever in the nineteenth century. Like Covid, Yellow Fever conjured racist imagery, portrayed as a disease that originated in less civilized countries, and which brought quarantines, death and upheaval to global commerce.
These often-toxic entanglements between medical discourse and capitalism are dissected by Mark Harrison in Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease (2012), which predates the Covid pandemic but remains relevant in the current political landscape. As he observes: “these protectionist impulses often exploit popular anxieties about disease and about the nature of trade itself, not least its propensity to destroy domestic industries and introduce new cultural influences” (Harrison 2012, 281). Harrison is one of the many scholars who demonstrate the validity of examining historical narratives of illness in literature and culture. Revisiting the past helps us engage with the complexity of the present, as we unravel the many ideas that make up our reality. As we have seen, some of these are concepts and frameworks that we have inherited from nineteenth-century imperialism, and which resurface in the present to yield a new yet very familiar imperialism.
Expanding the map of disease
Such epistemic expansion can be further broadened by adopting a multilingual approach, as advanced by Steven Wilson in his “Manifesto for a Multilingual Medical Humanities” (2023). My decision to foreground Spanish narratives of disease builds on this effort to transgress the Anglocentrism that permeates scholarship in both medical humanities and scientific research. As Michael Gordin reminds us in Scientific Babel (2015), the status of English as the default language for STEM subjects is a relatively new phenomenon. In his survey of the rise of English as the lingua franca of science, Gordin (2015, 7) notes that, in the period between 1880 and 1910, scholarly publications could be divided into one third each for English, French and German, in what he calls the “triumvirate.”
This time frame also coincides with the height of New Imperialism and what would euphemistically be known as “the partition of Africa.” In 1870, merely ten percent of the continent was under European control; barely four decades later, ninety percent was under colonial rule. Great Britain, France and Germany comprised the main forces behind this imperial project, although other countries, like Belgium, Italy and Spain, also participated in this territorial takeover. Spain was still an empire at the end of the nineteenth century, despite the loss of its Latin American colonies, after many of them became independent in the first decades of the 1800s. Yet Spain retained colonies on the African continent, including Equatorial Guinea, and expanded its holdings by establishing a protectorate in Morocco and Spanish Sahara, now Western Sahara.
As such, Spain thought like an empire and this shaped the reception of Darwinism in the country. Traditionally, the focus has been on a censorious Catholic Church that hampered scientific progress, but the mockery of evolutionary theory in “Hombres y animales” and “Gestas o el lenguaje de los monos” cannot only be ascribed to religion. Instead, these texts serve to attack Spain’s main colonial rival and satirise Darwinism as an extension of a corrupting British colonialism. Even today, Spain still retains two north African enclaves, Ceuta and Melilla, residuals from its incursion to Africa.
It thus remains useful to trace the cultural narratives of disease that emerged during the height of New Imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth to understand the imprint it has left on the cultural DNA of the West. Much remains to be studied, particularly in cultures and languages outside the Anglophone sphere. Researchers like Eugene T. Richardson make a compelling case in his Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Public Health (2020), in which he outlines the historical legacy of colonialism in global health interventions. Paying attention to specific cases, such as the reception of Darwinism in Spain, will help us understand specific local dynamics. In other words, focusing on the local will paradoxically help us navigate an increasingly globalised world.
About the author
Rocío Rødtjer holds a PhD from King’s College London, for which she was awarded an Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland-Spanish Embassy Doctoral Publication Prize. Recent publications include the monograph Women and Nationhood in Restoration Spain 1874–1931: The State as Family (2019), the co-authored survey “The Gothic in Nineteenth-Century Spain,” published in The Cambridge History of the Gothic (2020), and a chapter on liberal women and nationalism in The Palgrave Nineteenth-Century Transnational Women Writers Handbook. Her areas of research include gender and politics, as well as medical humanities, having contributed to Latin American and Iberian Perspectives on Literature and Medicine (2015). She is on Bluesky @rocio.bsky.social.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Katharine Murphy and Olivia Glaze for inviting me collaborate on this project, which is generously funded by an AHRC Research, Development and Engagement Fellowship (AH/X01133X/1) on “Reading Bodies: Narrating Illness in Spanish and European Literatures and Cultures (1870s to 1960s).”
References
Bell, T.E. 2006. Galdós and Darwin. Támesis.
Coello y Pacheco, Carlos. 1878. “Hombres y animales.” In Cuentos Inverosímiles, 209–68 . Biblioteca Perojo.
Darwin, Charles. 1871. The Descent of Man. John Murray.
Fernández Bremón, José. 1879. “Gestas o el lenguaje de los monos.” In Cuentos, 127–62. Oficinas de la Ilustración Española y Americana.
Harrison, Mark. 2012. Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease. Yale University Press.
Gordin, Michael. 2015. Scientific Babel: The Language of Science from the Fall of Latin to the Rise of English. Profile Books.
Ma, Hong, and Jingxin Ning. 2024. “The Return of Protectionism: Prospects for Sino-US Trade Relations in the Wake of Trade War.” China Quarterly International 4 (3): 182–211. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ceqi.2024.09.003.
Novo, Andrew R. 2020. “The Empires Strike Back: A New Age of Imperialism.” CEPA, August 29, 2020. https://cepa.org/article/the-empires-strike-back-a-new-age-of-imperialism.
Park, Sang Chul. 2025. “Protectionism for Economic Security in the West and Responses of the East.” In Geoeconomic Risks in Europe and the Indo-Pacific, edited by Sang Chul Park and Yun-Chen Lai, 13–35. Springer.
Puri, Samir. 2020. The Imperial Hangover: How Empires Have Shaped the World. Atlantic Books.
Richardson, Eugene T. 2020. Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Public Health. MIT Press.
Roedtjer, Rocío. 2025. “‘Either I civilize Africa, or I become a monkey’: Pathologizing Darwinism as British colonial degeneration in nineteenth-century Spanish narrative.” Journal of Romance Studies 25 (3): 357–75. https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.2025.18.
Wilson, Steven. 2023. “Manifesto for a Multilingual Medical Humanities.” The Polyphony, May 30, 2023. https://thepolyphony.org/2023/05/30/manifesto-multilingual-medhums.
