Modern Medicine as a Site of Colonial Continuity

This paper critically analyses modern medicine as a social institution, tracing its foundations to European colonialism. Drawing on historical examples, it demonstrates how ethnocentric and authoritarian approaches in colonial medicine continue to produce and shape contemporary medical knowledge and practice. The article then assesses the modern medical paradigm where all aspects of human behaviour are medicalised reflecting a subtle continuation of colonial authority. Modern medicine thus remains fundamentally an authoritative and normative institution grounded in colonial discourses, albeit in different forms. Reconstituted and intensified under neoliberal capitalism, this framework, which often reduces patients to consumers and commodifies well-being, entrenches health disparities, reproduces and reinforces existing power imbalances within healthcare systems.
By engaging with this topic, the paper aims to contribute to decolonial discourses in medicine and global public health. It advocates for reimagining health systems that move beyond colonial logics of domination, control, and extraction, towards models rooted in justice, plurality, and collective well-being.