Seminar Questions

• What priorities have shaped medical humanitarianism?
• How did Africans respond to the arrival of biomedicine? What legacies might early interactions with biomedicine have left?

• To what extent was colonial medicine humanitarian?

Required Reading

Readings

• Charles Good, Jr., The Steamer Parish: The Rise and Fall of Missionary Medicine on an African Frontier (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004 (pg. 311-332). (course extracts)
  
• Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pg. 29-54. (course extracts)
  
• Kathleen Vongsathorn, “Public Health or Public Good? Humanitarian Agendas and the Treatment of Leprosy in Uganda,” in Bronwen Everill and Josiah Kaplan (eds.), The History and Practice of Humanitarian Intervention and Aid in Africa (2013), pp. 43-66. (e-book)
  

Recommended Reading

• Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (2013), pg. 19-48. (e-book)
  

Further Reading

• Maryinez Lyons, The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
• Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
• Jean Comaroff, “The Diseased Heart of Africa: Medicine, Colonialism, and the Black Body,” in Shirley Lindenbaum and Margaret Lock (eds.), Knowledge, Power, and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life (1993), pp. 305-329.
• Luise White, “‘They Could Make Their Victims Dull’: Genders and Genres, Fantasies and Cures in Colonial Southern Uganda,” American Historical Review, 100.5 (Dec 1995), pp. 1379-1402.
• David Hardiman, Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and Africa (Amsterdam, 2006).
• Michael Jennings, ‘Healing of Bodies, Salvation of Souls’: Missionary Medicine in Colonial Tanganyika, 1870s-1939’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 38 (2008), 27-56.
• Paul Landau, ‘Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith’, Journal of African History, 37.2 (1996), 261-81.
• Shobana Shankar, ‘Medical Missionaries and Modernizing Emirs in Colonial Hausaland’, Journal of African History 48 (2007), 45-68.
• Shobana Shankar, ‘The Social Dimensions of Christian Leprosy Work among Muslims: American Missionaries and Young Patients in Colonial Northern Nigeria, 1920-40’, in Hardiman, D., Healing Bodies, Saving Souls: Medical Missions in Asia and Africa (Amsterdam, 2006), 281-305.
• Kathleen Vongsathorn, ‘First and foremost the evangelist’? Mission and government priorities for the treatment of leprosy in Uganda, 1927-48’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 6.3 (2012), 544-60.