Colonial Medicine Flashcards
Sara (Santjie) Baartman
- born in South Africa pre-1790
- taken to France and put on display
- died at age 26
- brain, genitals, and skeleton were kept in museum, along with plaster cast of her cast of her body
- kept on display until 1974
- returned to South Africa in 2002
colonial medicine
- colonial investigation into whether they were human or a “missing link”
- science used to justify racism (built heirarchy of value, morality, intelligence)
Motives for Colonialism
-god (missionaries), gold (resources for European countries), glory (more colonies = more power for state)
+also gather scientific knowledge of the unknown
Secular Colonial Medicine
- directed firstly towards the military, colonialists, the indigenous populations
- public health and control –> state discipline through public health
- control, surveillance, demonstration of power, status demonstrated through public health
- collective pathology (all Africans/indigenous people were naturally full of disease)
- modernity exacerbated disease (this idea was used to segregate)
Missionary Medicine
- saw disease as only being conquered through advancement of Christian morality
- sanitization = modernization (the Other as unsanitary)
- family life as father + mother + children
- Individual Africans responsible for their own sin
- humanitarianism and paternalism (“humane imperialism”)
- saw Africa and Asia as fertile grounds for converts
- missionaries provided majority of biomedical services up until the 1970s
- provided high-impact procedures (open wounds, cataracts, tumours)
- create links to local ways of thinking
- death bad conversions
- many who converted and stayed at missionaries converted (many were outcasts)
- British formed their ideas from missionaries
David Livingstone (1813-1873)
- Scottish
- one of the first missionaries with missionary AND medical training (from Glasgow, one of the rare universities to accept blacks)
- first person to cover Africa from coast to coast
- oened Africa to the outside world, wrote books, gave talks
- had lots of interaction with Africans, learned Satswana, collaborated with chiefs (protection/guns in exchange for land), sympathetic descriptions of Africans (still paternalistic)
- witnissed Nyangwe massaccre, witnessed horrors of slave trade and became staunch abolishonist
Albert Cook (1870-1951)
- 1890s medical missionaries became more professional (established hospitals)
- born and schooled in elite London, joined Christian Missionary Society
- Uganda 1897: opened Mengo Hospital, became one of the prestigious hospitals in Uganda/East Africa, treated 50-80 patients/day
- diagnosed the first cases of sleeping sickness
- sought o reduce the numbers of venereal disease, supported colonial “Social Purity Campaign”
- established mission school
The Fight for the Soul of the Body
British people formed their ideas of Africa through missionaries => Africa as the sick cotinent (being saved through heroic missionaries)
- wanted babies to grow up in the church (birth via midwives was worrying because midwives were powerful heathens. used rituals for birth => focus on reforming birth)
- “darkness” of the birthing hut (primitive, dirty, evil) vs. candles and white sheets of maternity wards (modern, progress, cleanliness)
- biomedical birth was a status symbol (technical capacity to save lives, mothers attended child welfare groups at mission hospitals – medicine as good for healthy child)
- baby shows: babies born in hospital were allowed to participate, babies that looked most clean (often meaning light-skinned, most Western) got prize
- but infant mortality and infection was still high
colonial effects on health
Africans were assumed to be naturally unhealthy
-but they were healthy before Colonialism (colonialists brought diseases to virgin soil like small pox, measles, cholera)
Effects on stolen land
-increased famine, decreased substantial farming/hunting/fishing, changes in land usage leads to increase in disease (e.g. sleeping sickness increased when buffer zone was removed and flies that could only fly from bush to bush weren’t contained. e.g. malaria – houses/preventing mosquitoes), men in labour force could no longer care for family
-“tropical disease” was actually colonial and poverty related (long term effects include HIV, mental illness, diabetes, poverty)
