Medicine and the Empire in Africa
NOTE THAT THIS SESSION WILL BE ON FRIDAY, 10:00-12:00 IN FAB 6.05
Lecturer: Dr Doreen Kembabazi
This week we will investigate the relationship between empire, health and medicine. With a particular focus on empire in Africa, we will explore the motivations that influenced the provision of healthcare in the colonial world; how medicine and theories of race related to ideologies of empire; and how indigenous and colonial medical ideas and practices interacted and competed. Who was perceived to have authority in the search for health, and why? What legacies of colonial medicine remain, and are the same ideologies and priorities that defined colonial medicine still prominent today?
Discussion/Essay Questions:
- What was the relationship between medicine and Empire?
- In what ways did indigenous medical practices and indigenous meanings of sickness and health conflict with colonial notions and colonial medical practices?
- What priorities have driven the provision of medicine in the colonial world?
- Was ‘racial science’ necessary to the expansion and/or survival of Empire?
Required Readings:
Adam Mohr. Missionary Medicine and Akan Therapeutics: Illness, Health and Healing in Southern Ghana's Basel Mission, 1828-1918
Megan Vaughan 1991 Curing their ills: colonial power and African illness: Chapter 3. The Great Dispensary in the Sky: Missionary Medicine. Available as e-Book via the library
Carol Summers. Intimate Colonialism: The Imperial Production of Reproduction in Uganda, 1907-1925 Signs 1991
Further Readings:
Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989)
Morag Bell, 'The Pestilence That Walketh in Darkness'. Imperial Health, Gender and Images of South Africa c. 1880-1910’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 18 (1993), 327-341 JSTOR
Bryan Callahan, “‘Veni, VD, Vici’? Reassessing the Ila Syphilis Epidemic,” Journal of Southern African Studies, 23.3 (1997), pp. 421-440.
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.
Waltraud Ernst and Bernard Harris (eds), Race, Science, and Medicine, 1700-1960 (London, 1999).
Feierman, S., ‘Struggles for Control: The Social Roots of Health and Healing in Modern Africa’, African Studies Review, 28.2/3 (1985), 73-147.
Karen Flint, 'Competition, Race, and Professionalization: Healers and White Medical Practitioners in Natal, South Africa in the Early Twentieth Century', Social History of Medicine, 14.2 (2001), 199-221 (e-journal)
Karen Flint, Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820-1948 (2008).
Nancy Rose Hunt, “‘Le Bebe en Brousse’: European Women, African Birth Spacing and Colonial Intervention in Breast Feeding in the Belgian Congo,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 21.3 (1988), pp. 401-432.
Nancy Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo
John Illife, East African Doctors: A History of the Modern Profession
Maryinez Lyons, The Colonial Disease. A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, 1992). Ch. 7: The campaign. Part one: sleeping sickness and social medicine, pp. 102-136
Adam Mohr, 'Missionary Medicine and Akan Therapeutics: Illness, Health and Healing in Southern Ghana's Basel Mission, 1828-1918', Journal of Religion in Africa Vol. 39, Fasc. 4 (2009), pp. 429-461
Maryinez Lyons, The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900-1940 (Cambridge, 1992). E-book
Roy Macleod and Milton Lewis (eds), Disease, Medicine and Empire: Perspectives on Western Medicine and the Experience of European Expansion (London, 1988).
Marissa Mika Africanizing Oncology Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda
Nakanyike Musisi,The Politics of Perception or Perception as Politics? Colonial and Missionary Representations of Baganda Women, 1900–1945
Randall Packard, “The Invention of the ‘Tropical Worker’: Medical Research and the Quest for Central African Labor on the South African Gold Mines, 1903-36,” Journal of African History, 34 (1993), pp. 271-292.
Jonathan Sadowsky, 'Psychiatry and Colonial Ideology in Nigeria', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 71 (1997), 94-111 E-Journal
Carol Summers. Intimate Colonialism: The Imperial Production of Reproduction in Uganda, 1907-1925
Jennifer Tappan. The Riddle of Malnutrition: The Long Arc of Biomedical and Public Health Interventions in Uganda
Lynn M. Thomas, ‘Imperial Concerns and 'Women's Affairs': State Efforts to Regulate Clitoridectomy and Eradicate Abortion in Meru, Kenya, c. 1910-1950’, The Journal of African History, 39, (1998), 121-145 JSTOR
Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills (Stanford, 1991).
Megan Vaughan, ‘Healing and Curing: Issues in the Social History and Anthropology of Medicine in Africa’, Social History of Medicine, 7 (1994), pp. 283-295. E-journal
Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills (Stanford, 1991); Chapter 6: Syphilis Medicine and the Limits of Colonial Medical Power
Luise White. Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa
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.
Julie Livingston, Debility and the Moral Imagination in Botswana
Caroline Bledsoe, Contingent Lives: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa
Myron Echenberg, Black Death, White Medicine: Bubonic Plague and the Politics of Public Health in Colonial Senegal, 1914‐1945.
Luongo, Katherine. Witchcraft and colonial rule in Kenya, 1900-1955
Timothy Burke, Lifebuoy Men, Lux Women: Commodification, Consumption and Cleanliness in Modern Zimbabwe
Gwyn Prins, “But What Was the Disease? The Present State of
Health and Healing in African Studies,” Past and Present 124 (Aug.,
1989), 159‐179
Susan Whyte, “Anthropological Approaches to African Misfortune, from Religion to Medicine,” in Anita Jacobsen‐Widding and David Westerlund (eds.), Culture, Experience, and Pluralism: Essays on African Ideas of Illness and Healing (1989)
Paul Landau, “Explaining Surgical Evangelism in Colonial Southern Africa: Teeth, Pain and Faith,” Journal of African History 37:2 (1996), 261‐281.
Steven Feierman, “Explaining Uncertainty in the Medical World of Ghaambo,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 74 (2000): 317‐344
Shula Marks, “What is Colonial about Colonial Medicine? And What has Happened to Imperialism and Health?,” Social History of Medicine 10:2 (1997), 205‐219.
Maureen Malowany, “Unfinished Agendas: Writing the History of Medicine of Sub‐Saharan Africa,” African Affairs 99 (2000): 325‐349.
Ismail Abdalla, Islam, Medicine, and Practitioners in Northern Nigeria
Adelola Adeloye, African Pioneers of Modern Medicine: Nigerian Doctors of the Nineteenth Century
Kofi Appiah‐Kubi, Man Cures, God Heals: Religion and Medical Practice Among the Akan of Ghana
David Arnold (ed.), Imperial Medicine and Indigenous Societies J. Beattie and J. Middleton (eds.), Spirit Mediumship and Society in Africa
Ann Beck, Medicine, Tradition and Development in Kenya, 1920‐1970
Janice Boddy, Wombs and Alien Spirits: Women, Men, and the Zar Cult in Northern Sudan
Alexander Butchart, The Anatomy of Power: European Constructions of the African Body
Gordon Chavunduka, Traditional Healers and the Shona Patient
Gordon Chavunduka, Traditional Medicine in Modern Zimbabwe
Gordon Chavunduka and Murray Last, The Professionalization of Traditional Healers
Albert R. Cook, Uganda Memories
Toyin Falola and Dennis Ituavuar (eds.), The Political Economy of Health in Africa
Feierman and J. Janzen (eds.), The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa
Feierman, Peasant Intellectuals: History and Anthropology in Tanzania
John Ford, The Role of the Trypanosomiases in African Ecology
Michael Gelfand (ed.), The Traditional Medical Practitioner in Zimbabwe
Michael Gelfland, Godly Medicine in Zimbabwe
Charles Good, Ethnomedical Systems in Africa: Patterns of Traditional Medicine in Rural and Urban Kenya
G.W. Hartwig and K.D. Patterson (eds.), Disease in African History
John Janzen, The Quest for Therapy in Lower Zaire
John Janzen, Lemba, 1650‐1930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the New World
John Janzen, Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa
David Lan, Guns and Rain: Guerillas and Spirit Mediums in Zimbabwe
Tracy Luedke and Harry West (eds.), Borders and Healers: Brokering Therapeutic Resources in Southeast Africa
Maryinez Lyons, The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Zaire, 1900‐ 1940
Mackenzie (ed.), Imperialism and the Natural World
Shula Marks, Divided Sisterhood: Race, Class and Gender in the South African Nursing Profession
Harriet Moore and Megan Vaughan, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890‐1990
Harriet Ngubane, Body and Mind in Zulu Medicine: An Ethnography of Health
Pamela Reynolds, Traditional Healers and Childhood In Zimbabwe
E.E. Sabben‐Clare (ed.), Health in Tropical Africa During the Colonial Period
Jonathan Sadowsky, Imperial Bedlam: Institutions of Madness in Colonial Southwest Nigeria
P.W. Settel (ed.), Histories of Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS in Sub‐Saharan Africa
Shane Doyle. Before HIV: Sexuality, Fertility and Mortality in East Africa, 1900-1980
Eric Silla, People Are Not the Same: Leprosy and Identity in Twentieth‐Century Mali
W.D. Hammond Tooke, Rituals and Medicines: Indigenous Healing in South Africa
Rita Headrick, Colonialism, Health, and Illness in French Equatorial Africa
Patrick Tumwasi, Medical Systems in Ghana: A Study in Medical Sociology
Victor Turner, The Drums of Afflication Merideth Turshen, Political Economy of Health and Disease in Tanzania
I.M. Wall, Hausa Medicine: Illness and Well‐Being in a West African Culture Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History: Disease, Power, and Imperialism
Stanley Yoder (ed.), African Health and Healing System