Markku Hokkanen, Medicine, Mobility and the Empire

Markku Hokkanen’s book begins its examination of almost a hundred years of medical history in Nyasaland, or modern day Malawi, in 1859, when David Livingstone’s Zambesi expedition initiated interchanges between Africans living in the area and Europeans. It grapples with the ways in which cross-regional exchange and interconnected networks shaped knowledge and practice about health and disease in the area from the mid-nineteenth century to 1960. Hokkanen argues that ‘mobility, manifested through networks, was a crucial aspect of the intertwined medical cultures that shared the search for medicines in changing conditions’ (p.2). With this focus, he discusses medicine within local, regional and global perspectives and examines how medical ideas spread and were adapted. As he argues, ‘to understand medicine, mobility and networks in colonial Malawi, it is also necessary to investigate regional, imperial and global history’ (p.3). The first chapter sets the stage for the overall interrelationship of the region in exchange of ideas of health and disease by giving a brief background of Malawian history. He points out that it was more than simply the movement of people that contributed to the high prevalence of disease in the second half of the nineteenth century, as increased disruption through regional warfare and famine also impacted the health of Malawians. While religious specialists, both indigenous and missionary, often treated ailments, he highlights the medical pluralism that existed within the area, where ideas of healing were absorbed and adapted. Later chapters explore this medical pluralism further by examining the networks of exchange that arose through geographical societies, travellers, missionaries and labour networks. As shown in the third chapter, missionary medicine provided most of the western medical treatment in the early years, but as costs increased after the First and Second World Wars religious organisations moved more towards mobile dispensaries run by nurses and assistants. These ‘mobile middles’ as he terms them, were initially made up of freed slaves and then later by African missionaries and pupils. These ‘medical middles’ were the most mobile within the area, ‘moving as they did between mission, government and private sector employment, and across local and regional boundaries’ (p.157). Some, such as Daniel Sharpe Malekebu and Hastings Kamuzu Banda, used African American mission connections to further their education. Most medical services, both those offered by European practitioners and by the mobile middles, embraced secular and spiritual ideas about health through the use of prayer and the bible. Missionary doctors, however, seldom adopted African spiritual practices

Ancient history · Colonialism · Economic growth · Empire · Ethnology · Famine · Geography · Indigenous · Pluralism (philosophy · Political science · Sociology · History of Science and Medicine · Medicine · History · Law

• Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences 2019

  Francesco Luzzini•Isis•2019

  Add to list