The medical career of Mississippi native Andrew Bowles Holder (1860-1896) began inauspiciously. After receiving his medical degree, he obtained his first post thanks to his father’s letter to the Office of Indian Affairs, which resulted in Holder’s appointment as physician to the Crow Agency in Montana. Holder began his medical career far from home, facing a set of unusual healthcare challenges amongst a new, untrusting patient population. Holder confronted two challenges on the reservation. First, as an Agency physician, Holder faced outbreaks of pneumonia, diphtheria, malaria, dysentery, measles, and cholera, obstetrical cases, and the occasional gunshot wound. But Holder also experienced challenges to his ideas about normative behavior and bodies, particularly through his encounters with the Bote, individuals he described as “not men, not women,” and in his observations of indigenous health practices, which continued even in the face of the “civilizing” efforts of the Agency.
Holder’s manuscript and published writings on Native American health and bodies reflect four modes of knowledge production: ethnography, experiment, bibliography, and clinical observation. I use Holder’s career to explore the complexity of conceptions about embodiment at the end of the nineteenth century, and the extent to which first-hand experiences with non-white patients could reinforce or transform theoretical, philosophical, and political ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and health. In particular, I explore the extent to which medicine was perceived to be civilizing force, and the limits of this process in the face of intransigent native health practices and bodies.
