Indians in the Colonial Medical Service

Abstract

It is very curious that Indian doctors have been ignored in the colonial medical history of Africa. Although scholars have examined the European doctors of the various African Colonial Medical Services, non-white personnel have received comparatively little attention.2 Some studies have looked at the lower ranked African personnel, but the experiences of the Indian doctors that worked contemporaneously in higher status positions have received no attention.3 Indeed, the studies of non-European doctors in the Indian and African Empires have been so infrequent that one could be forgiven for thinking that Indians and Africans had no access to medical education and therefore were not employed in anything other than positions that did not require professional qualifications. Mark Harrison has briefly touched upon the Indian staff cohort of the Indian Medical Service (IMS) and Ryan Johnson has examined the progressive exclusion of the small numbers of black doctors from the West African Medical Service from the beginnings of the twentieth century.4 But these studies are exceptions, with the majority of the historiography focussing on either the white elites or the black subordinates, with little or no acknowledgement of non-white qualified practitioners. Indeed, even the broad histories of the East African medical administration written by Anne Beck in the 1960s and 1970s did not consider the work of Indians within the colonial health department.5