The Boundaries of Colonial Medicine

Abstract

This book is about colonial medicine and its emphasis on colony. Colonial medicine suggests that we should understand overseas medical practice during the age of imperialism in the context of the interwoven political, economic, and social institutions and interests that constituted each different colonial regime. Such an emphasis is particularly important because colonialism, even within the British empire, took on a wide range of forms. Certainties about the binary division between colonizer and colonized are being challenged as we come to appreciate the roles played by members of the ‘colonized’ population in colonial administrations. This book seeks to describe and define the ‘colonial’ and the ‘medical’ in Sudan between 1899 and 1940. Colonial officials, including doctors, worked at physical frontiers, between provinces, nations, peoples, and zones of infection and non-infection. Colonial medicine in Sudan involved employing non-European doctors and training African medical personnel. Colonial doctors recognized that one of the main ways in which colonial rule changed epidemiology was by influencing patterns of population movement.