Abstract
It is very curious that Indian doctors have been ignored in the colonial medical history of Africa. Although scholars have examined the European doctors of the various African Colonial Medical Services, non-white personnel have received comparatively little attention.2 Some studies have looked at the lower ranked African personnel, but the experiences of the Indian doctors that worked contemporaneously in higher status positions have received no attention.3 Indeed, the studies of non-European doctors in the Indian and African Empires have been so infrequent that one could be forgiven for thinking that Indians and Africans had no access to medical education and therefore were not employed in anything other than positions that did not require professional qualifications. Mark Harrison has briefly touched upon the Indian staff cohort of the Indian Medical Service (IMS) and Ryan Johnson has examined the progressive exclusion of the small numbers of black doctors from the West African Medical Service from the beginnings of the twentieth century.4 But these studies are exceptions, with the majority of the historiography focussing on either the white elites or the black subordinates, with little or no acknowledgement of non-white qualified practitioners. Indeed, even the broad histories of the East African medical administration written by Anne Beck in the 1960s and 1970s did not consider the work of Indians within the colonial health department.5
[T]he Government had no option but to employ assistant and sub assistant surgeons in certain parts of the colony, and that when such officials had rendered meritorious service, it would appear to be inequitable and indeed contrary to public interest in view of the small number of European doctors, that they should be debarred from continuing to practice.1
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Notes
Colin Baker, ‘The Government Medical Service in Malawi: An Administrative History, 1891–1974’, Medical History, 20,1976, pp. 296–311;
A. Bayoumi, The History of the Sudan Health Services, Nairobi, Kenya Literature Bureau, 1979;
E.B. Van Heyningen, ‘“Agents of Empire”: The Medical Profession in the Cape Colony, 1880–1910’, Medical History, 33, 1989, pp. 450–71; Heather Bell, Frontiers of Medicine in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1899–1940, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1999; Crozier, Practising Colonial Medicine, I.B. Tauris, 2007.
For example, Ca, ‘The Second Class Doctor and the Medical Assistant in South Africa’, South African Medical Journal, 31 March 1973, pp. 509–12; Karen Shapiro, ‘Doctors or Medical Aids—The Debate over the Training of Black Medical Personnel in the Rural Black Population in South Africa in the 1920s and 1930s’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 13, 1987, pp. 234–55;
Maryinez Lyons, ‘The Power to Heal: African Medical Auxiliaries in Colonial Belgian Congo and Uganda’, in David Engels and Shula Marks (eds.), Contesting Colonial Hegemony: State and Society in Africa and India, London, British Academic Press, 1994, pp. 202–23; Anne Digby, ‘The Mid-Level Health Worker in South Africa: The In-Between Condition of the “Middle” ’, in Ryan Johnson and Amna Khalid (eds.), Public Health in the British Empire: Intermediaries, Subordinates, and the Practice of Public Health, New York & London, Routledge, 2012, pp. 17–92. For East Africa see John Iliffe, East African Doctors: A History of the Modrn Profession, Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Ryan Johnson, ‘The West African Medical Staff and the Administration of Imperial Tropical Medicine, 1902–1914’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 38.3, 2010, pp. 419–39;
Ryan Johnson, ‘“An All White Institution”: Defending Private Practice and the Formation of the West African Medical Staff’, Medical History, 54.2, 2010, pp. 237–54.
Beck makes passing reference to the existence of Indian medical practitioners in her book Ann Beck, A History of the British Medical Administration of East Africa: 1900–1950, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1999 (first published, 1970), p. 13. Her other works make no reference at all, see for example Ann Beck, ‘Problems of British Medical Administration in East Africa between 1900–1930’ Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 36,1962, pp. 275–83; Ann Beck, ‘Native Medical Services in British East Africa and Native Patterns of Society’, in Verhandlungen des XX Internationalen Kongresses für Geschichte der Medizin, Berlin, 22–27 August 1966, Hildesheim, Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1968, pp. 870–75.
Lord Hailey, An African Survey: A Study of the Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara, Oxford University Press, 1938, p. 1182.
M.S. Rao, ‘The History of Medicine in India and Burma’, Medical History, 12.1, 1968, pp. 52–61, 56;
D.G. Crawford, A History of the Indian Medical Service, 1600–1913 (two vols.), London, W. Thacker, 1914, p. 649;
Mark Harrison, Public Health in British India: Anglo Indian Preventative Medicine, 1859–1914, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 32.
For the campaigns to improve Indian access to the IMS see: Roger Jeffery, ‘Doctors and Congress: The Role of Medical Men and Medical Politics in Indian Nationalism’, in Mike Shepperdson and Colin Simmons (eds.), The Indian National Congress and the Political Economy of India, 1885–1985, Aldershot, Brookfield, USA, Avebury, 1988. pp. 160–73.
H.A. Bödeker, ‘Some Sidelights on Early Medical History in East Africa’, The East African Medical Journal, 12, 1935–36, pp. 100–7, 101, 105.
Lord Hailey, An African Survey: A Study of the Problems Arising in Africa South of the Sahara Revised 1956, London, New York, Toronto, Oxford University Press, 1957, p. 1081; For more detail on the history of African medical education in East Africa see Iliffe, East African Doctors.
Christine Stephanie Nicholls, Red Strangers: The White Tribe of Kenya, London, Timewell Press, 2005, p. 209.
Not least as the editor of the EAMJ between 1922–28 was Christopher Wilson, who held explicitly white supremacist view. See C.J. Wilson, Before The Dawn in Kenya, Nairobi, The English Press, 1952;
C.J. Wilson, Kenya Warning: The Challenge to White Supremacy in Our British Colony, Nairobi, The English Press, 1954.
T.D. Nair, ‘A Tana River Yaws Campaign’, Kenya and East Africa Medical Journal, 4.7, 1927–28, pp. 201–7.
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© 2015 Anna Greenwood and Harshad Topiwala
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Greenwood, A., Topiwala, H. (2015). Indians in the Colonial Medical Service. In: Indian Doctors in Kenya, 1895–1940. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137440532_5
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