Physicians, Colonial Racism, and Diaspora in West Africa (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Physicians, Colonial Racism, and Diaspora in West Africa Jonathan Sadowsky Adell Patton, Jr. Physicians, Colonial Racism, and Diaspora in West Africa. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. xx + 343 pp. Ill. $49.95. Historians of Africa have long been aware of the racial discrimination faced by African physicians in colonial medical institutions, but Adell Patton, Jr., has done the field a major service with this massively researched inquiry. Using archives from four countries and a number of interviews, he follows the consequences of colonial arrangements in the life histories of a number of sub-Saharan West African physicians. Patton’s study is restricted to Anglophone countries, and one hopes that his example will inspire similar studies of physicians in the Francophone colonies. Patton convincingly demonstrates several major patterns. By the mid-nineteenth century, fledgling European colonial enterprises faced a shortage of medical personnel and therefore encouraged Africans to seek medical training in Europe. In the late decades of the century, with the concurrent rise of formal colonialism and scientific racism, new policies restricting the authority of African physicians were enacted. The reaction was in full swing by the turn of the century, when Africans were formally prohibited from being employed in the new West African Medical Staff—a service that was paid for by taxes on West Africans. African physicians trained in Western countries increasingly faced a number of other affronts. For example, they were not permitted to give orders to a European physician, even one with lesser educational attainment. Patton shows that many African physicians therefore became politicized upon their return to the colony. Medicine was one of the few professions that provided an independent livelihood, and this further allowed physicians to channel their political discontent into leadership in anticolonial activities. In the final chapter, Patton traces the careers of a number of African physicians trained in the Soviet Union after World War II: the Soviet Union fostered a medical education that was more strictly specialized than that of Western Europe, and as a result these Africans practiced with an outlook different from that of many of their earlier-trained compatriots. Patton’s occasional discussions of indigenous African medical systems are less compelling. The early chapters contain some description, based on secondary sources, of ancient Egyptian medicine, but the relevance of this material is unclear given his claim that this tradition had no impact south of the Sahara (p. 48). Traditional healers have an important background role in this study, since their practices have been a continual source of competition for Western-trained [End Page 724] physicians; Patton dismisses traditional healers throughout as “unscientific,” without engaging the literature on the efficacy of traditional medicines. But these are minor themes. As a study of Western-trained African physicians, Physicians, Colonial Racism, and Diaspora is a much-needed contribution to African medical history and to the comparative study of professions. Jonathan Sadowsky Case Western Reserve University Copyright © 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press