This article provides an overview of the historiography of medical education and calls for greater attention to the connections between medical schools. It begins by reviewing research on medical education in imperial metropoles. Researchers have compared medical schools in different national contexts, traced travellers between them or examined the hierarchies that medical education created within the medical profession. The article then shows how historians have emphasised the ways in which medicine in colonial empires was shaped by negotiation, exchange, hybridisation and competition. The final part of the article introduces the special issue ‘Medical Education in Empires’. Drawing on a variety of sources in English, French, Dutch and Chinese, the special issue builds on these historiographies by juxtaposing cases of medical schools in imperial contexts since the eighteenth century. It considers who funded these medical schools and why, what models of medicine underpinned their creation, what social changes they contributed to, what life was like in these schools, who the students and teachers were and what graduates did with their medical careers. This special issue thus contributes to clarifying the role of medical education in empires and the long-term impact of empires on the medical world.

In the early nineteenth century, medical schools became a growing means of regulating medicine in the British Empire, both in the metropole and in two colonies: India and Canada. By examining the establishment of medical schools in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Quebec City, Montreal and Toronto between the end of the Seven Years’ War and the beginning of the Victorian era, this article argues that the rise of the British Empire was a key factor in the gradual replacement of private medical apprenticeships with institutional medical education. Although the imperial state did not implement a uniform medical policy across the British Empire, the medical schools established under its jurisdiction were instrumental in devising a curriculum that emphasised human dissection, bedside training in hospitals and organic chemistry as criteria of medical competence.

This article examines some of the racist features of nineteenth-century medical school curricula in the United States and the imperial networks necessary to acquire the data and specimens that underpinned this part of medical education, which established hierarchies between human races and their relationship to the natural environment. It shows how, in a world increasingly linked by trade and colonialism, medical schools were founded in the United States and grew as the country developed its own imperial ambitions. Taking advantage of the global reach of empires, a number of medical professors in different states, such as Daniel Drake, Josiah Nott and John Collins Warren, who donated his anatomical collection to Harvard Medical School on his retirement in 1847, began to develop racial theories that naturalised slavery and emerging imperialism as part of their medical teaching.

In 1851, the colonial administration of the Dutch East Indies established a two-year program to educate young Javanese men to become vaccinators in Batavia (today’s Jakarta). During the following sixty years, the medical curriculum was expanded several times; in 1913, it consisted of a ten-year program. In 1927, the Batavia Medical School, granting degrees equivalent to those of Dutch university-affiliated medical schools, commenced operations. Consequently, a steadily increasing number of Indonesian physicians with various credentials were employed by the colonial health service, plantations, sugar factories and mines, or established private practices. They became a social group that occupied an ambiguous and even paradoxical position somewhere between Europeans and the indigenous population. During the 1910s, this inspired these physicians to obtain credentials and professional recognition equal to those of their European colleagues. Several of them became active in journalism, politics and social movements. During the 1920s, several became radicalised and criticised the nature of colonial society. In the 1930s, following the increasingly repressive nature of colonial society, most of them remained active in the public sphere while a small group dedicated itself to improving medical research and health care. After the transfer of sovereignty from the Netherlands to Indonesia on 27 December 1949, this small cadre reestablished medical education and health care, and built the Indonesian medical profession.

While larger British colonies in Africa and Asia generally had their own medical services, the British took a different approach in the South Pacific by working with other colonial administrations. Together, colonial administrations of the South Pacific operated a centralised medical service based on the existing system of Native Medical Practitioners in Fiji. The cornerstone of this system was the Central Medical School, established in 1928. Various actors converged on the school despite its apparent isolation from global centres of power. It was run by the colonial government of Fiji, staffed by British-trained tutors, attended by students from twelve colonies, funded and supervised by the Rockefeller Foundation, and jointly managed by the colonial administrations of Britain, Australia, New Zealand, France and the United States. At the time of its establishment, it was seen as an experiment in international cooperation, to the point that the High Commissioner for the Western Pacific called it a ‘microcosm of the Pacific’. Why did the British establish an intercolonial medical school in Oceania, so far from the imperial metropole? How did the medical curriculum at the Central Medical School standardise to meet the imperial norm? And in what ways did colonial encounters occur at the Central Medical School? This article provides answers to these questions by comparing archival documents acquired from five countries. In doing so, this article will pay special attention to the ways in which this medical training institution enabled enduring intercolonial encounters in the Pacific Islands.

Between 1903 and 1952, there was a Jesuit and French university in Shanghai called l’Aurore. This article focuses on its medical faculty, which operated from 1912 to 1952. It shows that, in a precarious political and military context, l’Aurore simultaneously benefited from Jesuit missionary activity and the French quest for imperial influence, without fully identifying with either. The faculty was not an official missionary institution, and most of its hundreds of students were not Christians. However, the Jesuit administration kept a record of baptisms among the students and, based on Catholic principles, encouraged opposition to birth control through courses on ‘medical ethics’ and a special oath that medical graduates had to take. Nor was the medical faculty an overtly imperial institution. It was part of a concession and the result of an alliance between Jesuit missionaries and anti-clerical diplomats of the French Third Republic. Yet, the faculty was key to a French policy of imperial influence designed to compete with other imperial, religious, and private foreign powers active in medical education in China. During the years of war between China and Japan (1937–1945), the faculty consolidated its influence by increasing student numbers and building new infrastructure, whereas its Chinese staff assumed a more prominent role, reinforcing the importance of Chinese medicine in teaching and research. Doctors trained at l’Aurore who stayed in China remained active in public health until well into the second half of the twentieth century, even after the medical faculty was abolished by the Communist regime.