A Medical Education with a Difference: A History of the Training of Black Student Doctors in Social, Preventive and Community-Oriented Primary Health Care at the University of Natal Medical School, 1940s–1960

Abstract

This article analyses the history of the establishment of the first black medical school in South Africa in 1951, and efforts to develop it as an innovative centre for training students in curative and hospital-based medicine, but also, importantly, in preventive and promotive community-oriented primary health care approaches in patients’ homes, health centres and community settings. It traces the history of a significant, though short-term, formal affiliation that was achieved with the assistance of American Rockefeller Foundation funding between the state's health centre research, service and training institute – the Institute of Family and Community Health – and this Durban Medical School. Key innovations introduced into the School's curriculum that were not taught in the other white medical schools at the time are examined. Here a focus on teaching students to appreciate the wider socio-economic, cultural, environmental and biological factors affecting health and diseases, as well as provision of a clinical training for students beyond the walls of the teaching hospital, is key. Finally, it considers the controversial nature of this medical educational experiment in apartheid South Africa at a school that only taught ‘non-European’ students before its eventual demise by the early 1960s.