Pioneer medical missions in colonial Africa

Abstract

Protestant and Roman Catholic missions pioneered Western medicine and public health in much of Africa decades in advance of health services provided by colonial governments. A century later church-based hospitals and health care programs continue to account for 25% to 50% of available services in most African countries. In view of the important historical and continuing role of medical missions it is remarkable that there have been no systematic scholarly studies of the impacts of these pioneer institutions on the geography of health and social change in colonial Africa. How, for example, was the health of African populations and the areas they inhabited changed by the activities of medical missions? And how did Africans respond to Western medicine and its alien institutional social and technological structures and relations? This paper develops the historical context and conceptual framework for investigating such topics. It presents a detailed research agenda organized around nine themes, each of which suggests a series of interrelated questions. The methodology employs the techniques of medical and historical geography, and is based on comparative, longitudinal case-studies of medical missions at the local level coupled with archival study.