Quinine, Whisky, and Sun Helmets: Amateur Medicine in British East and South-Central Africa, 1890-1939

<p>Historians have extensively studied colonial doctors in Africa, and the connection between colonial medical services and imperial power. The focus has, however, fallen almost exclusively on medical practice by trained, qualified, and professional doctors and nurses, and neglected amateur treatments carried out by white settlers. This project explores amateur medical treatment in rural parts of British East and South-Central Africa, primarily Kenya and Rhodesia, between 1890 and 1939. It draws upon a range of memoirs, novels, letters, and advice books, most notably the memoirs of white settler women including Karen Blixen, Elspeth Huxley, Hylda Richards, and Alyse Simpson. The time period is characterised by a marked contrast between the emergence of tropical medicine and hygiene on the one hand, and, on the other, a continuation of nineteenth-century medical ideas, techniques, and widespread fears of the tropical climate. During the 1890s, tropical medicine and hygiene developed as specialised professional fields of expertise. Yet despite substantial tropical medical advances during and after the 1890s, the disease environment of East and South-Central Africa remained associated with high mortality and morbidity for white settlers. White bodies continued to be viewed, in the popular mind, as profoundly vulnerable to the African environment. Pre-germ theory etiologies of disease and treatment techniques persisted within white settler communities. This thesis studies the medical skills, ideas, and practices of white settlers in the region. It demonstrates that much of settlers’ medical care was performed by other settlers, positioning amateur treatment as crucial to colonial health. The discussion considers advice produced and disseminated through the flourishing print culture of African guidebooks and tropical medical handbooks; tropical outfitting; the translation of popular medical and hygiene advice into white settler practice; and the amateur treatment techniques (most importantly, quinine, alcohol, and disinfectant) and body protection methods that feature in memoirs and letters. Malaria forms a major theme in amateur treatment and prevention. The thesis also examines white settler women’s amateur medical practice in African communities, and the shifting patterns of agency and colonial hegemony within these intimate medical encounters. It argues that settlers’ medical practice displayed a distinctive set of techniques and ideas that adapted, re-worked, and re-interpreted professional medical advice. It concludes that settlers’ amateur medical practice formed an essential element of colonial medicine and bolstered British authority in the region.</p>

Quinine, Whisky, and Sun Helmets: Amateur Medicine in British East and South-Central Africa, 1890-1939

<p>Historians have extensively studied colonial doctors in Africa, and the connection between colonial medical services and imperial power. The focus has, however, fallen almost exclusively on medical practice by trained, qualified, and professional doctors and nurses, and neglected amateur treatments carried out by white settlers. This project explores amateur medical treatment in rural parts of British East and South-Central Africa, primarily Kenya and Rhodesia, between 1890 and 1939. It draws upon a range of memoirs, novels, letters, and advice books, most notably the memoirs of white settler women including Karen Blixen, Elspeth Huxley, Hylda Richards, and Alyse Simpson. The time period is characterised by a marked contrast between the emergence of tropical medicine and hygiene on the one hand, and, on the other, a continuation of nineteenth-century medical ideas, techniques, and widespread fears of the tropical climate. During the 1890s, tropical medicine and hygiene developed as specialised professional fields of expertise. Yet despite substantial tropical medical advances during and after the 1890s, the disease environment of East and South-Central Africa remained associated with high mortality and morbidity for white settlers. White bodies continued to be viewed, in the popular mind, as profoundly vulnerable to the African environment. Pre-germ theory etiologies of disease and treatment techniques persisted within white settler communities. This thesis studies the medical skills, ideas, and practices of white settlers in the region. It demonstrates that much of settlers’ medical care was performed by other settlers, positioning amateur treatment as crucial to colonial health. The discussion considers advice produced and disseminated through the flourishing print culture of African guidebooks and tropical medical handbooks; tropical outfitting; the translation of popular medical and hygiene advice into white settler practice; and the amateur treatment techniques (most importantly, quinine, alcohol, and disinfectant) and body protection methods that feature in memoirs and letters. Malaria forms a major theme in amateur treatment and prevention. The thesis also examines white settler women’s amateur medical practice in African communities, and the shifting patterns of agency and colonial hegemony within these intimate medical encounters. It argues that settlers’ medical practice displayed a distinctive set of techniques and ideas that adapted, re-worked, and re-interpreted professional medical advice. It concludes that settlers’ amateur medical practice formed an essential element of colonial medicine and bolstered British authority in the region.</p>

Imperium und Gesundheit

Libya was a special Italian colony. It was geographically close to Italy and had a similar climate; moreover, it had been part of the Roman Empire, a feature that was equally stressed in the colonial ideology of the liberal and Fascist eras. The aim of this study is to illustrate the role of Italian colonial medicine in Libya from 1911–1912 to the Fascist period. Continuities, resemblances and differences, and the meaning ascribed to the „health“ of the colonizers and the colonized, are investigated using publications by doctors and political writers.

Between colonial medicine and global health: protein malnutrition and UNICEF milk in the Belgian Congo

During the last decades of colonial rule, Belgian colonial authorities, health agencies and researchers intensely engaged with kwashiorkor, a severe syndrome that was deemed widespread among young children in some parts of the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi and chiefly attributed to protein malnutrition. To fight kwashiorkor, the Belgian government, in the early 1950s, set up a joint milk distribution campaign with the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, Food and Agriculture Organization and World Health Organization, the first of its kind in colonial Africa. Placing this campaign in the context of mounting international and inter-imperial concern about kwashiorkor and other nutritional problems in Africa and across the globe, this article explores its rationales, mechanisms and consequences, and in particular, how the campaign was shaped and publicised by FORÉAMI, one of the main health providers on the ground. It not only contributes to the history of European colonial medicine and nutritional policies, but also opens new perspectives on international health collaboration during late colonialism. It argues that Belgian authorities were wary of international interference in colonial policies, but that especially FORÉAMI also viewed and used the campaign as an opportunity to display its ‘mastery’ in rural and infant healthcare and control the narrative on Belgium’s colonial medicine.

When the Physician Becomes an Apostle

Missionary medicine, especially healthcare offered by Catholic missions, is a rather neglected field in the study of colonial medicine. In addition, the potential of analytical tools such as the circulation of knowledge or attention for professional identities has not been fully explored yet. In this study of physicians in the Belgian Congo, we argue that a new professional identity – or persona – of the Catholic colonial doctor arose as a result of Catholic religious doctrine, missionary politics and biomedical developments. The persona of the mission’s main healthcare provider, with a strong commitment to curative medicine, was a metropolitan professional identity shaped by older missionary narratives. In colonial day-to-day reality, however, where tensions between physicians, missionaries and state officials abounded, this discursive identity proved difficult to maintain.

The Legacy of Colonial Medicine in Central Africa

Between 1921 and 1956, French colonial governments organized medical campaigns to treat and prevent sleeping sickness. Villagers were forcibly examined and injected with medications with severe, sometimes fatal, side effects. We digitized 30 years of archival records to document the locations of campaign visits at a granular geographic level for five central African countries. We find that greater campaign exposure reduces vaccination rates and trust in medicine, as measured by willingness to consent to a blood test. We examine relevance for present-day health initiatives; World Bank projects in the health sector are less successful in areas with greater exposure. (JEL F54, I12, I15, I18, N37, N47, Z13)

Managing Madness

The lunatic asylums were largely ‘custodial’ in nature and had complex hierarchical structures that preserved hierarchies between the ‘sane’ and the ‘insane’, ‘white’ and ‘black’, and the ‘high’ and ‘low’ castes and classes. These binaries were an intrinsic part of colonial medicine. The ‘insane hospitals’ were renamed as the ‘mental hospitals’ by the second decade of the twentieth century. This chapter maps the changes that took place in terms of architecture, medicine, and treatment. The novel principles of moral management became obsolete as the fears of degeneration gave psychiatry a biological turn. Not only did the architectural values change but the underlying ‘scientific’ understanding of madness, its diagnosis and treatment underwent fundamental transformations. It examines the ways in which bureaucratic experiences were structured, organized, and reified into modern Indian psychiatry.