It has been argued that Western medicine introduced by European colonizers and missionaries saved millions of lives in Africa, Asia, and the Americas (Comaroff & Comaroff, 1992). In this context, Western medicine represented a higher civilization and social order that lifted people to modern ways of life. David Livingstone, known for his religious zealotry, chose a medical career to heal the suffering of Africans: “In the glow of love which Christianity inspires, I soon resolved to devote my life to the alleviation of human misery… and therefore set myself to obtain a medical education, in order to be qualified for that enterprise” (Livingstone, 1858; Moffat, 1969). Medical missionaries believed that the eradication of fatal diseases among the indigenous people would encourage the “heathens” to embrace Christianity. Commenting on the effort to establish a public health department in India by the British colonial government in the mid-nineteenth century, Florence Nightingale observed...
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Hewa, S. (2014). Medicine and Colonialism in Sri Lanka. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3934-5_8760-2
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