The 1920s Anti-Yaws Campaigns and Colonial Medical Policy in Kenya

Bibliographic Data

ID3913560
AuthorsMarc H Dawson (corresponding author)
Year1987
Volume20
Issue3
Pages417
Publication date1987-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe International Journal of African Historical Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0361-7882 • E-ISSN: 2326-3016
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/219687
PMID11617206
OpenAlexW13834003
LanguageEN
Citations received13

The 1920s yaws eradication campaigns in Kenya provide an opportunity to examine several different aspects of health and healing during the colonial era.1 First, the campaigns represent the initial efforts by the colonial regime to work on an endemic disease which affected virtually only rural Africans. Second, they offer an opportunity to understand the political and economic constraints under which colonial medical policy was formed, as well as the medical profession's own views of possible solutions to rural African health problems. Third, antiyaws therapy of the 1920s helped create the mystique in Africa of the healing power of the injection and aided in gaining limited acceptance of Western biomedicine by rural African populations. Finally, the campaigns ended with a short-term success of reducing the number of clinically active yaws cases, but resulted in other unforeseen and unintended long-term problems. In Kenya, the first mass health survey of the African population was the 1915 medical examinations of African male conscripts for the Carrier Corps. The results shocked medical authorities when 30 to 40 percent (and sometimes more) of young adult men were rejected as medically unfit. The total number of unfit young men was even higher, as African chiefs and local European administrators had not sent many obviously unfit individuals for examination. The main problems were tertiary yaws and organic heart disease, which crippled or incapacitated many men.2 After World War I, this poor state of health and the terrible loss of life from disease in the Carrier Corps prompted the Medical

Archaeology · Colonialism · Geography · Political science · History · History of Medicine and Tropical Health

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub