TY  - GEN
A1  - Adair, Gigi
T1  - The “Feringhi Hakīm”: medical encounters and colonial ambivalence in Isabella Bird’s travels in Japan and Persia
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe
N2  - This article considers Isabella Bird’s representation of medicine in Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880) and Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan (1891), the two books in which she engages most extensively with both local (Chinese/Islamic) and Western medical science and practice. I explore how Bird uses medicine to assert her narrative authority and define her travelling persona in opposition to local medical practitioners. I argue that her ambivalence and the unease she frequently expresses concerning medical practice (expressed particularly in her later adoption of the Persian appellation “Feringhi Hakīm” [European physician] to describe her work) serves as a means for her to negotiate the colonial and gendered pressures on Victorian medicine. While in Japan this attitude works to destabilise her hierarchical understanding of science and results in some acknowledgement of traditional Japanese traditions, in Persia it functions more to disguise her increasing collusion with overt British colonial ambitions.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Philosophische Reihe - 120 
KW  - Isabella Bird
KW  - medicine
KW  - travel
KW  - gender
KW  - colonialism
KW  - missionaries
KW  - Japan
KW  - Persia
Y1  - 2017
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-395316
SN  - 1866-8380
IS  - 120
ER  -