Jack London’s Medical Migrations to a Pan-Pacific Alliance

Abstract

Jack London’s life and career represent an exemplary case for the interrelation of transnational American Studies and medical humanities. In the short period of the forty years of his life he traveled the world and encountered a great number of illnesses and diseases, those of others and his own, from his infancy in 1876 to his premature death in 1916. Although he was born in San Francisco and died on his ranch in the Sonoma Valley of California, he was constantly on the move in a series of national and transnational migrations to Asia, the Canadian Northland, Alaska, Europe, Hawaiʻi, the Pacific Islands, Australia, North and South America. The principal motive for these kinds of unusual migrations is the miserable conditions of life in isolation and poverty, considered a social disease, which he tries to overcome by seeking adventures on land and sea trusting in his good stamina to improve his material situation. It is the experience of these unhealthy conditions of physical and social conditions, which brings about his career as a writer and makes him transform the contemporary Anglo-Saxon perception of the superiority of “the inevitable white man" into a plea for the acceptance of diversity and the realization of the need for a safe environment in the biosphere. In this contribution I will focus on four decisive episodes in Jack London's adventurous life in which the combination of medical and social issues are stages on the road to his eventual vision and formulation of a healthy environment and an egalitarian alternative society. In my reading of these medical migrations he serves as a prime example of living transnational American Studies.