Pub Date : 2022-01-26eCollection Date: 2021-01-01DOI: 10.1080/13507486.2021.1958762
John Manton
Long an expatriate-run concern, leprosy control was subsumed as a key component of rural public health in the years following Nigerian Independence in 1960 by the enlisting of a cadre of African inspectors, deployed across an existing institutional landscape by a newly Nigerianized medical bureaucracy. The performative norms of leprosy control, once thoroughly colonial and suffused with the ripe vocabulary of a long-entrenched missionary diaspora, were renovated at the heart of a new concern with rural public health more broadly, as the needs, expectations and hierarchies encoded in relations between patient, court, bureaucrat and medical worker shifted and settled in accordance with new political horizons. For health workers, issues of patient and worker mobility, drug delivery, patient and community expectation, and their own physical and financial security were dramatized in a series of commentaries, complaints and reports denoting deeply felt anxieties over the viability of careers in the service of Nigerian health. This article outlines struggles surrounding leprosy control and rural public health work in the Qua Iboe Mission catchment, administered by the newly created Ikot Ekpene Medical Field Unit. It documents a shift in medical work from European missionary to national and technocratic, the foregrounding of concerns with African (worker and patient) welfare and mobility, and the emergence of novel post-colonial forms of public health advocacy and politics along the highways and byways of Ibibio- and Annang-speaking areas of southeastern Nigeria in the 1960s.
{"title":"Qua Iboe by motorcycle and launch: brokering public health coverage in 1960s Southeastern Nigeria.","authors":"John Manton","doi":"10.1080/13507486.2021.1958762","DOIUrl":"10.1080/13507486.2021.1958762","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Long an expatriate-run concern, leprosy control was subsumed as a key component of rural public health in the years following Nigerian Independence in 1960 by the enlisting of a cadre of African inspectors, deployed across an existing institutional landscape by a newly Nigerianized medical bureaucracy. The performative norms of leprosy control, once thoroughly colonial and suffused with the ripe vocabulary of a long-entrenched missionary diaspora, were renovated at the heart of a new concern with rural public health more broadly, as the needs, expectations and hierarchies encoded in relations between patient, court, bureaucrat and medical worker shifted and settled in accordance with new political horizons. For health workers, issues of patient and worker mobility, drug delivery, patient and community expectation, and their own physical and financial security were dramatized in a series of commentaries, complaints and reports denoting deeply felt anxieties over the viability of careers in the service of Nigerian health. This article outlines struggles surrounding leprosy control and rural public health work in the Qua Iboe Mission catchment, administered by the newly created Ikot Ekpene Medical Field Unit. It documents a shift in medical work from European missionary to national and technocratic, the foregrounding of concerns with African (worker and patient) welfare and mobility, and the emergence of novel post-colonial forms of public health advocacy and politics along the highways and byways of Ibibio- and Annang-speaking areas of southeastern Nigeria in the 1960s.</p>","PeriodicalId":45725,"journal":{"name":"European Review of History-Revue Europeenne d Histoire","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-01-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8802893/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39762894","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2001-01-01DOI: 10.1080/13507480120074242
L Mathe-Shires
In the first half of the ninteenth century West Africa became associated with the term 'white man's grave'. This was mostly due to the extremely high European mortality rates resulting from endemic disease, especially malaria. The second half of the nineteenth century is usually described as the birth of tropical medicine, which indicates a development in scientific medicine partially attributed to the empirical experiences of the mid-century. The treatment and prevention of the above-mentioned disease changed substantially in the period. This article discusses the public perception of West Africa in the years between the Niger Expedition in 1841 and the Ashanti campaign in 1874. The two events, which mark the chronological framework of the paper, both played a significant part in the history of malaria as much as in the history of British imperial expansion in the region. Using mostly contemporary printed works, it is argued that despite the development that occurred in the field of medicine and subsequent decline in European mortality, the associated image of 'the deadly climate' of West Africa prevailed between the two events for a variety of political, economic and cultural causes.
{"title":"Imperial nightmares: the British image of \"the deadly climate\" of West Africa, c. 1840-74.","authors":"L Mathe-Shires","doi":"10.1080/13507480120074242","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13507480120074242","url":null,"abstract":"In the first half of the ninteenth century West Africa became associated with the term 'white man's grave'. This was mostly due to the extremely high European mortality rates resulting from endemic disease, especially malaria. The second half of the nineteenth century is usually described as the birth of tropical medicine, which indicates a development in scientific medicine partially attributed to the empirical experiences of the mid-century. The treatment and prevention of the above-mentioned disease changed substantially in the period. This article discusses the public perception of West Africa in the years between the Niger Expedition in 1841 and the Ashanti campaign in 1874. The two events, which mark the chronological framework of the paper, both played a significant part in the history of malaria as much as in the history of British imperial expansion in the region. Using mostly contemporary printed works, it is argued that despite the development that occurred in the field of medicine and subsequent decline in European mortality, the associated image of 'the deadly climate' of West Africa prevailed between the two events for a variety of political, economic and cultural causes.","PeriodicalId":45725,"journal":{"name":"European Review of History-Revue Europeenne d Histoire","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2001-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/13507480120074242","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"29445659","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}