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)

of Europeans and indigenous populations living apart had a relatively long history in the British imperial territories, especially in India, dating as far back as the 1820s, and gaining additional impetus after the Mutiny. By the late nineteenth century British attitude towards the dwelling environment with native populations had reached further levels of distance, especially in India. Yet, in places like West Africa, the close proximity of European and African dwellings remained a constant feature of colonial urbanisation. Ronald Ross, the discoverer of the role of mosquito in the transmission of malaria, visited West Africa as a member of a scientific expedition of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. His conversations with the British governor of Sierra Leone that he found it strange that Europeans were Living closely to Africans can be understood in the context of his Indian background. It was a remark made in an informal conversation and not as a scientific discovery or suggestion for prophylactic methods.

12 This was the environment where members of the Royal Society medical expeditions arrived and found that 'It is evident the native dwellings are fertile sources of anopheles and the Europeans in every case [i.e. malaria; L.M.] had such sources within a few yards of their houses.'

13 Segregation as the single most important preventive measure was formulated in the years between 1900 and about 1905 when the Freetown Hill Station was completed where Europeans would have been living in a distanced place form Africans. Most British governors and their medical personnel accepted by this time segregation as the preventive measure for Europeans. Naturally it caused serious problems among Africans who saw in it the racial element as well as the sole emphasis on the European prevention of the disease. It was only in the later years, following the war, when representatives of a new generation of colonial governors questioned its applicability and use. It was the epidemics (plague in 1908 in the Gold Coast and yellow fever in the Gambia in 1911), rather than the most feared killer of all endemic diseases, i.e. malaria, that shaped colonial medicine into what it became by the 1930s as it happened in the case of Ceylon and the Sudan with epidemic malaria and sleeping sickness.

14 * * * Around 1900 the future Nigeria was divided into three distinctive and almost different territories. These were the colony of Lagos, the protectorate of southern Nigeria, including the vast commercial empires of the Royal Niger Company and the Oil Rivers, and the north which was, at this time, not defeated by the British forces yet. Lagos and its immediate proximity represented an unhygienic township situated on a lagoon, with numerous marshes and swamps around it. The Protectorate stretching over the Niger delta again offered a formidable malaria endemic territory. Undoubtedly the territories of Nigeria and, 12 Ross' remarks can be clearly reconstructed from the Nathan papers and Ross' letters deposited there: Nathan to Chamberlain 21

st August 1899. MS Nathan, 251. Nathan to Ross 12

th September 1899. Ibid. Prout to Nathan 11

th September 1899. MS Nathan, 249. Nathan to Ross 12

lh September 1899. MS Nathan, 251. The Nathan Papers are available at the Rhodes House, Oxford. 13 "Distribution of anopheles in Sierra Leone", in Report to the Malaria Committee, I. Series: 57. Available at the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at Oxford 14 Jones, Margaret, 'The Ceylon Malaria Epidemic of 1934—35: A Case Study in Colonial Medicine', Social History of Medicine, Vol. 13 No. 1. (1999), 87—109. and Bell, Heather, Frontiers of Medicine in the AngloEgyptian Sudan 1899—1940. (Oxford, 1999), 127—163.