Health: The French and Their Colonial Empire

Abstract

It is generally agreed today among medical historians and anthropologists that the presence of Europeans during the first four decades of colonialism contributed to the deterioration of health conditions in Africa rather than to the improvement of the lives of its millions of inhabitants. Among the foremost medical Africanist historians Philip Curtin stands out, who has been writing on colonial medical policies and practices since the 1970s. From his work and that of many other medical historians, including Gerald Hartwig, David Patterson, Terence Ranger, Charles Good (a medical geographer), Steven Feierman, and John Janzen, we now have a clear picture of the impact of colonialism from the 1800s to the 1950s on African traditional medical practices and therapies and how the Europeans viewed them. The ideas and the concepts being developed by experts—who, at the end of the 1800s, had begun to study the disease environment in Africa, such as Sir Richard Ross, Robert Koch, and Eugene Jamot, working at times in tandem with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine—were incorporated into the planning of the cities and towns of Africa, especially the capital cities where the European population was expected to congregate, live, and work, as well as the colonial outposts, military garrisons, and health care facilities. The issue of race and race relations, right from the beginning of the encounter during the nineteenth century, affected by the perception of disease and its mode of transmission, shaped the future of health on the continent, which, from inception, was designed to protect the European population, particularly local administrators and officers of the colonial army corps.