In 1825 the commissioners of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Sierra Leone sent the black surgeon William Fergusson a set of detailed queries about tropical health in Britain's West African colonies. Fergusson had studied medicine at Dumfries Infirmary, Edinburgh University and Edinburgh’s Royal College of Surgeons.  When the queries arrived, he had been working in Sierra Leone as a surgeon for a decade and was arguably the leading medical statistician in the colony.  Like other contemporary parliamentary directives related to health and natural history, Fergusson and the colony’s other medical staff saw the queries as a set of scientific instructions, a list of data-gathering categories that needed to be filled by officials. 

Though the official purpose of the Commission’s health queries was to identify whether the tropical climate of Sierra Leone helped or hindered its financial viability as a crown colony, Fergusson realised that its questions were framed by racialised assumptions about the climate’s impact upon the bodies of Africans and Europeans.  This essay explores the actions he took to prevent a seemingly bureaucratic exercise from contributing to the alarming rise of racialised health data within British colonial information systems.

The evidentiary centrepiece of Fergusson’s report was a statistical table, a databank of numbers, that demonstrated race was an ethnographic, not a biomedical or climatological, distinction. Treating the table as a data artefact, I argue he exerted moral agency against the racialised assumptions of the British state in the way he gathered, categorised and calculated the information he had ascertained on the ground in the colony. Using hitherto lost printed and manuscript documents from the British Library that were compiled and written by Fergusson, I reveal that his table was not merely a list of numbers.  Rather, it was a moral engine, an object created to counter the racialised assumptions imbedded in the scientific instructions he had received from Parliament.

Professor Matthew Daniel Eddy Durham University’s Chair and Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science and the Co-Director of the Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. He is also one of our research partners in the Instructing Natural History project. He studies the history of science in Europe and its former empires. He is currently examining medical instructions in India in the nineteenth century. Read more about his work here.

The Instructing Colonial Natural History Seminar Series is organised by the Instructing Natural History Research Group, Uppsala University

To register for the Zoom link, please email instructingnaturalhistory@uu.se