Beyond the state : The colonial medical service in British Africa

Anna Greenwood

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN:
  9780719089671
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

The Colonial Medical Service was the personnel section of the Colonial Service, employing the doctors who tended to the health of both the colonial staff and the local populations of the British Empire. Although the Service represented the pinnacle of an elite government agency, its reach in practice stretched far beyond the state, with the members of the African service collaborating, formally and informally, with a range of other non-governmental groups. This collection of essays on the Colonial Medical Service of Africa illustrates the diversity and active collaborations to be found in the untidy reality of government medical provision. The authors present important case studies covering former British colonial dependencies in Africa, including Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda and Zanzibar. They reveal many new insights into the enactments of colonial policy and the ways in which colonial doctors negotiated the day-to-day reality during the height of imperial rule in Africa.

Table of contents

• Front matter
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: looking beyond the state
• Crossing the divide: medical missionaries and government service in Uganda, 1897–1940
• The government medical service and British missions in colonial Malawi, c.1891–1940: crucial collaboration, hidden conflicts
• The maintenance of hegemony: the short history of Indian doctors in the Colonial Medical Service, British East Africa
• The Colonial Medical Service and the struggle for control of the Zanzibar Maternity Association, 1918–47
• Elder Dempster and the transport of lunatics in British West Africa
• Social disease and social science: the intellectual influence of non-medical research on policy and practice in the Colonial Medical Service in Tanganyika and Uganda
• Cooperation and competition: missions, the colonial state and constructing a health system in colonial Tanganyika
• Bibliography
• Index