Magyar László szerk.: Orvostörténeti Közlemények 174-177. (Budapest, 2001)

TANULMÁNYOK — ARTICLES - Máthé-Shires László: Who Lives Where? British Anti-Malaria Policy in Southern-Nigeria (1899-1912)

WHO LIVES WHERE? BRITISH ANTI-MALARIA POLICY IN SOUTHERN-NIGERIA (1899—1912) LÁSZLÓ MÁTHÉ-SHIRES Diseases and medicine have lost their apolitical nature in history as a result of some interpretations in the last three decades. The imperial and colonial context in the tropical world is especially apt to attract scholarly attention, analysing the history of medicine from this point of view. We certainly must refer to the influence of Foucault, and some important works that utilised his suggestions directly, conceptualising the political overtones of medicine in the context of the colonised and the coloniser.

1 More recent scholarly interpretations have put emphasis on the role of epidemics as easily definable categories where political decisions came to play an increasingly important role.

2 Malaria is an endemic disease that can also turn into epidemic forms. The historical aspect of malaria epidemics is being explored, an approach that is similar to the mentioned 'epidemic centred analysis'.

3 Endemic malaria in the colonial context has received considerably less attention in the last ten years, a period when the genre of imperial and colonial medicine has been formulated. The following article explores the political aspects of the history of endemic malaria in the colonial context of British Southern Nigeria in the first decade of the twentieth century. West African diseases and the Euro-African relations The West African disease environment has always influenced the region's political and social development significantly. This was especially true for the Euro-African relations where endemic diseases played a uniquely important role. Malaria was the most important obstacle to European penetration to the interior of West Africa throughout the whole of the 1 Foucault, Michel, Surveiller et punir. Paris, 1975 [Hungarian edition, Felügyelet és büntetés. Budapest, 1990, and idem., Maladie mentale et psychologie — Naissance de la clinique. Paris, 1955, 1997. [Hungarian edition, Elmebetegség és pszichológia —A klinikai orvoslás születése. Budapest, 2000.) For some suggestive works using his approach, see especially Vaughan, Megan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness. Cambridge, 1991 and Arnold, David, Colonizing the Body. Berkeley, 1993. 2 For an initial, 'epidemic centred approach', see Lyons, Marynez, The Colonial Disease: A social history of sleeping sickness in northern Zaire, 1900—1940. Cambridge, 1992. Later works have also taken this unit of analysis. See for example Bell, Heather, Frontiers of Medicine in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1899—1940. Oxford, 1999; Roberts, Jonathan, 'The Black Death in the Gold Coast: African and British Responses to the Bubonic Plague Epidemic of 1908', in Gateway, March Issue Story 3. 1—47. [http://grad.usask.ca/gateway/laststory03.htm; as of 24

th of August 2001] 3 Jones, Margaret, 'The Ceylon Malaria Epidemic of 1934—35: A Case Study of Colonial medicine', in Social History of Medicine. Vol. 13. No. 1. (1999), 87—109. and Bell, Frontiers, 90—126.