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37
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"Medicine and the humanities Africa 19th century."
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Exploring Victorian Travel Literature
This interdisciplinary study explores both the personal and political significance of climate in the Victorian imagination, analysing foreboding imagery of miasma, sludge and rot across non-fictional and fictional travel narratives, speeches, private journals and medical advice tracts.
eBook
The systematic techno-stylistic and chemical study of glass beads from post-15th century West African sites
The systematic chemical analysis of large collections of archaeological glass beads is essential to better understand trade patterns at different times around the world. Glass beads’ trade towards and within sub-Saharan West Africa grew exponentially over time to culminate with the establishment of the Atlantic Trade. Although these artefacts are very commonly found in archaeological contexts dating after the 15 th century CE, the assemblages are generally poorly studied from a chemical point of view. We present here the study of 916 glass beads found in five archaeological sites in Ghana, Mali, and Senegal, in contexts dated between the 15 th and the mid-20 th century CE. Besides the techno-stylistic classification of the whole assemblage, the compositional study of a sub-group of 578 monochrome and polychrome glass beads was performed. The 798 glass samples composing the selected beads were therefore classified based on their main chemical composition. Moreover, major, minor, and trace elements analysis by Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) and the statistical analysis of the results by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) led to the identification of the probable origin of the glass. Different suppliers were distinguished for the Ghanaian earlier beads and the Senegalese and Malian later ones, in relation to the different European trade partners at different times.
Journal Article
Psychiatry and empire
'Psychiatry and Empire' brings together scholars in the History of Medicine and Colonialism to explore questions of race, gender and power relations in former colonial states across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific. The volume advances our understanding of the rise of modern psychiatry as it collided with the psychology of colonial rule.
eBook
Two Genealogies of Human Values: Nietzsche Versus Edward O. Wilson on the Consilience of Philosophy, Science and Technology
In the twenty-first century, Stephen Hawking proclaimed the death of philosophy. Only science can address philosophy’s perennial questions about human values. The essay first examines Nietzsche’s nineteenth century view to the contrary that philosophy alone can create values. A critique of Nietzsche’s contention that philosophy rather than science is competent to judge values follows. The essay then analyzes Edward O. Wilson’s claim that his scientific research provides empirically-based answers to philosophy’s questions about human values. Wilson’s bold new hypothesis about the ‘social conquest of the earth’ challenges Nietzsche’s vision of philosophy’s mission. Confronting both Nietzsche and Wilson, the essay then considers three theoretical proposals for a consilience of philosophy, science, engineering and technology. The conclusion presents a working African model of consilience that addresses the existential problem of poverty in the Global South.
Journal Article
Indian Doctors in Kenya, 1895-1940
This ground-breaking book offers unique insights into the careers of Indian doctors in colonial Kenya during the height of British colonialism, between 1895 and 1940. The story of these important Indian professionals presents a rare social history of an important political minority.
eBook
Classifying the body in Marlene Dumas' The Image as Burden
Medical photography, and in particular dermatological imagery, is often assumed to provide an objective, and functional, representation of disease and that it can act as a diagnostic aid. By contrast, artistic conceptions of the images of the body tend to focus on interpretative heterogeneity and ambiguity, aiming to create or explore meaning rather than enact a particular function. In her 2015 retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern, South African artist Marlene Dumas questions these disciplinary divides by using medical imagery (among other photographic sources) as the basis for her portraits. Her portrait ‘The White Disease’ draws on an unidentified photograph taken from a medical journal, but obscures the original image to such a degree that any representation of a particular disease is highly questionable. The title creates a new classification, which reflects on disease and on the racial politics of South Africa during apartheid. Though, on the one hand, these techniques are seemingly disparate from the methods of medical understanding, features such as reliance on classification, and attempts at dispelling ambiguity, bring Dumas’ work closer to the history of dermatological portraits than would usually be perceived to be the case. In considering the continuities and disparities between conceptualisations of skin in dermatology and Dumas’ art, this paper questions assumptions of photographic objectivity to suggest that there is greater complexity and interpretative scope in medical dermatological images than might initially be assumed.
Journal Article
“I Was Doctor”: White Settler Women’s Amateur Medical Practice in East and South-Central African Communities, 1890–1939
Professional medicine in colonial British Africa has been extensively examined by historians. Few scholars, however, have adequately considered the role that white settlers without medical training played in the provision of colonial health care in local African communities. This article addresses the gap by exploring amateur medical treatment by white settler women in East and South-Central African communities between 1890 and 1939, primarily in highland areas of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia. It examines the types of conditions treated, what techniques and equipment were used for treatment, and where treatment was carried out. It also explores medical identity in settler women's memoirs. Last, it considers the degree of choice exercised by patients in these amateur medical encounters. Overall, this article situates white settlers' amateur treatment in African communities as an important strand of colonial health care and as an intimate contact zone between white settlers, colonial medicine, and local people.
Journal Article
Yaws, Syphilis, Sexuality, and the Circulation of Medical Knowledge in the British Caribbean and the Atlantic World
This history of the disease categories \"yaws\" and \"syphilis\" explores the interplay between European and African medical cultures in the early modern Atlantic world. The assertion made by both early modern and modern medical authorities, that yaws and syphilis are the same disease, prompts a case study of the history of disease that reflects on a variety of issues in the history of medicine: the use of ideas about contagion to demarcate racial and sexual difference at sites around the British Empire; the contrast between persistently holistic ideas about disease causation in the Black Atlantic and the growth of ontological theories of disease among Europeans and Euro-Americans; and the controversy over the African practice of yaws inoculation, which may once have been an effective treatment but was stamped out by plantation owners who viewed it as a waste of their enslaved laborers' valuable time.
Journal Article
Conjuring the Modern in Africa: Durability and Rupture in Histories of Public Healing between the Great Lakes of East Africa
Schoenbrun argues that colonial and postcolonial studies of modernity tend to sever precolonial history from what comes after it. Schoenbrun confronts this historiographical divide by presenting a long-term history of persistent clusters of meanings and practices relating to public healing in the African region of the Great Lakes.
Journal Article