Medical Missionaries and Colonial Knowledge in West Africa and Europe, 1885-1914

Beschreibung

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 fabricof hygiene, which continues to shape our understanding of purity, health and cleanliness to this day.

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.

Autor*in

Linda Maria Ratschiller Nasim

Themen in »Medical Missionaries and Colonial Knowledge in West Africa and Europe, 1885-1914«

Switzerland Hygiene Cleaniness Colonial medicine Medical missionaries West African history Cameroon Gold Coast Basel Religious purity High Imperialism Tropical medicine Evangelical missions Scramble for Africa History of science

Stimmen zu »Medical Missionaries and Colonial Knowledge in West Africa and Europe, 1885-1914«

Linda Ratschiller Nasim’s impressive study breaks new ground by reconstructing entangled histories of evangelicalism, scientific medicine, and colonialism in the making of hygiene in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It demonstrates how hygiene has held a special place in the imagination of Africa and continues to shape conceptions of self and other in European societies to this day. Drawing upon a rich case study of the influential Basel mission in West Africa, this engaging book is essential reading for those interested in the intersecting histories of medicine and scientific endeavour, mission and empire, and culture and society in West Africa." 

 David Maxwell, Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastic History, University of Cambridge

Details

Link teilen