Immigration, Ethnicity and ‘Public’ Health Policy in Postcolonial Britain

Abstract

What happens at the end of empire, when decolonisation draws far-flung populations ‘home’ to an environment — political, social and physical — very different from either colonial or imperial expectations? Drawing on British examples, this chapter explores medical and especially public health responses to postcolonial migrants and their ethnically marked descendants in the era of decolonisation and Cold War, responses often generated by professional men and women themselves returning from or building upon careers begun in Britain’s tropical colonies. It focuses on two diseases which came to be closely associated with immigration in the years after the Second World War: tuberculosis (TB) and rickets (in adults, osteomalacia). This pairing facilitates comparisons between medical policies and projects mediated largely by public health actors and interventions, and those shaped principally by the interests and innovations of elite biomedical research. Additionally, it presents the different ways in which infectious and nutritional disorders were addressed and the impact of ‘race’ on perceptions of ‘imported’ illnesses and the migrants affected by them.KeywordsNational Health ServiceMigrant GroupMigrant ChildAsian CommunityPublic Health ResponseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.