“Health is Much too Important A Subject to be Left to Doctors”: African Assistant Health Workers in Natal During the Early Twentieth Century

Unlike earlier scholarship that has explored the important histories of “traditional” African and Indian healers, as well as “non-European” nurses and doctors in South Africa, this article is centrally concerned with analysing a far less researched subject. It will examine the experiences of professionally subordinate “non-European”, but particularly African, auxiliary health personnel – such as missionary medical assistants, and state employed medical aids and community health workers – who were trained and worked within the western biomedical system in South Africa.