Fish-eating Disease Theory and Colonial Marine Fisheries

With the advent of the industrial revolution, attitudes in Britain and America towards fish meat changed dramatically. Since fish was an affordable and nourishable food for the working class, it is reasonable that fisheries would develop rapidly as well. In British India, due to the hot humid climate preserving fish by freezing was not widespread, and fish-pickling had become the common practice adopted by local fisheries. This formed the historical context for the birth of Johnathan Hutchinson's medical concept of fish-eating diseases. He believed that eating insanitary fish could be the cause of leprosy and many other illnesses, and the success of British fisheries depended heavily on the production of healthy fish according to the principles of public health science. As a result, salt was advocated as a medicament instead of just a condiment. The salt-earth pickling method common among India's poor was condemned and prohibited for its lower salt usage. The moist curing method also was condemned as hazardous for public health. Despite the eventual failure of the fish-pickling industry, all those practices were valuable when viewed from the perspective of the social history of medicine. It offers a vivid example for medical historians to grasp the complex relations and interactions among medical notions, economy industries and cultural conceptions, and for exploring the generation and evolution mechanism of providing realistic scientific knowledge.