Overview
- Offers an entangled history of hygiene between West Africa and Europe during the age of High Imperialism
- Highlights the role of medical missionaries in the formation of tropical medicine as a scientific discipline
- Combines religious, scientific and colonial history to analyse the genealogy of modern-day hygiene
- This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access
Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies (CIPCSS)
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About this book
This open access book offers an entangled history of hygiene by showing how knowledge of purity, health and cleanliness was shaped by evangelical medical missionaries and their encounters with people in West Africa. By tracing the interactions and negotiations of six Basel Mission doctors, who practised on the Gold Coast and in Cameroon from 1885 to 1914, the author demonstrates how notions of religious purity, scientific health and colonial cleanliness came together in the making of hygiene during the age of High Imperialism. The heyday of evangelical medical missions abroad coincided with the emergence of tropical medicine as a scientific discipline during what became known as the Scramble for Africa. This book reveals that these projects were intertwined and that hygiene played an important role in all three of them. While most historians have examined modern hygiene as a European, bourgeois and scientific phenomenon, the author highlights both the colonial and the religious fabric of hygiene, which continues to shape our understanding of purity, health and cleanliness to this day.
Keywords
Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Spaces of Knowledge and Meanings of Hygiene in the Nineteenth Century
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Front Matter
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Negotiations of Hygiene “on the Margins” 1885–1914
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Front Matter
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Reverberations of Hygiene 1885–1914
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
David Maxwell, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastic History, University of Cambridge
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Medical Missionaries and Colonial Knowledge in West Africa and Europe, 1885-1914
Book Subtitle: Purity, Health and Cleanliness
Authors: Linda Maria Ratschiller Nasim
Series Title: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27128-1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2023
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-27127-4Published: 03 November 2023
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-27130-4Published: 21 August 2024
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-27128-1Published: 02 November 2023
Series ISSN: 2635-1633
Series E-ISSN: 2635-1641
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XVIII, 454
Number of Illustrations: 9 b/w illustrations, 5 illustrations in colour
Topics: Imperialism and Colonialism, African History, History of Medicine, History of Religion, History of Germany and Central Europe