3,098 research outputs found
The creation of the first overseas Pasteur Institute, or the beginning of Albert Calmette's Pastorian career.
article mis en ligne par la revue:http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1044108&blobtype=pdfInternational audienc
The creation of the first overseas Pasteur Institute, or the beginning of Albert Calmette's Pastorian career
India on the move: the palanquin, the elephant and the railway
This thesis examines how British travellers experienced the Indian climate
and landscape in, from and through three vehicles: the palanquin, the elephant
and the railway. Much historical study has approached Western experiences
of tropical nature with what this thesis calls a 'sedentary perspective';
that is, by studying the individuals, the sites and the representational practices
connected with observant travel. The most obvious aspect of such travel
â the mobility of soldiers, merchants, administrators and tourists â has been
comparatively neglected. Travel in India, rather than merely connecting
events across the expanse of the journey, was a significant space of experience
and the mode by which travellers encountered their surroundings. This
thesis argues that specific mobilities engendered distinct relations between
the perceiving subject and the environment perceived. Means of transport â
the palanquin, elephant and railway â were also means of observation, shaping
the experience of landscape, ideas of tropical nature and the traveller as
subject
The tropical environment and malaria in southwestern Nigeria, 1861 â 1960
This thesis is a social history of malaria in southwestern Nigeria. It contributes to the burgeoning literature in the historiography of medicine, specifically the medicine and empire debate. Key to the issues raised in this thesis is the extent to which the limitations in colonial medical policies, most especially malaria control programmes, inspired critical and ingenious responses from African nationalists, doctors, patients, research volunteers, and indigenous medical practitioners. Challenged by a wide range of diseases and a paucity of health facilities and disease control schemes, African rural dwellers became medical pluralists in the ways they imagined and appropriated ideas of Western medicine alongside their indigenous medical practices. Beginning with a detailed historical exploration of the issues that informed the introduction of curative and preventive medicine in southwestern Nigeria, this thesis reveals the focus of colonial medicine. It exposes the one-sided nature of medical services in colonial spaces like southwestern Nigeria and the ways it shaped multifaceted responses from Africans, who were specifically side-lined till the 1950s when the rural medical service scheme was introduced. The focus of colonial medicine is drawn from relatively rich but often subjective historical evidence, such as a plethora of official reports of the department of medical and sanitary services, official correspondences within the colonial government in Lagos and Nigeria, and between the colonial government and the colonial office in the United Kingdom. Details of African responses to medical policies were garnered from newspaper publications and correspondences between the African public and the colonial government in Lagos. They reveal very interesting details of the ways Africans imagined, reimagined, and appropriated malaria control ideas and schemes. The central argument in this thesis is that attempts to control malaria in southwestern Nigeria till the 1950s, were shaped by a single concern to ameliorate the implications of the disease on the colonial state. It argues that this one-sided nature of malaria control programme informed the basis for medical pluralism in most rural spaces where African communities became patrons and sponsors of Western medicine and at the same time custodians of their indigenous medical practices. The series of justifications for the sustenance of these services were reinforced on the basis of the failure of the colonial state to guarantee the health needs of their colonial subjects. The aim of the thesis is to reinforce arguments that portray colonial medicine as a âtool of empireâ but goes a bit further to explain the extent to which Africans related to this reality. It states quite categorically that Africans were not docile and silent, but that they acted decisively in ways that suited their varied interests and courses
Heat stroke: a study of the effects of heat and altitude on the inhabitants of Utrecht, Natal
The underground atmospheric working environment of the
Rand mines is hot and humid, and in some cases associated
with stagnation of air. Hard manual labour in such conditions may produce pathological reactions, namely, Heat-collapse and Heat-stroke.Heat-collapse is due to cardiac embarrassment brought about by the inability of the heart to cope with the increased
physiological demands made upon it by the work and the
environment. The symptoms and signs are those of a fatigued
heart, namely, headache, dizziness, general feeling of weakness or collapse. The discomfort that these symptoms produce prevents further muscular work and therefore saves the
already overworked heart from still further effort. Heat-collapse is therefore in a sense protective.It is only natural that workers who are debilitated as
the result of disease are more prone to heat -collapse than
normal healthy subjects. Further, the abnormal strain put
on the heart, as the result of work in bad underground environment, 7hich normally produces symptoms of heat-collapse,
may in diseased subjects be sufficient to bring about a complete breakdown of the heart's action with subsequent death.Heat-stroke is a condition of acute mental excitement
with delirium, convulsions, muscular twitchings or tremors
and is always associated with a high body temperature. The
actual causative agent in the body which precipitates this
condition has not yet been established. Hyperpyrexia is
merely an accompaniment of the general bodily derangement
and is not the causative agent. The invariable absence of
diagnosable disease in cases of heat - stroke on admission to
hospital, and the subsequent similar findings by Macro- and
micro- pathological examination in cases that terminate
fatally, is consistent with the fact that co-existing disease does not play a role in precipitating heat-stroke. Unlike heat-collapse, heat-stroke only occurs in unacclimatised subjects. Owing to the acute onset and course of the
affliction, treatment directed at anticipating an attack is
impossible.Heat-stroke is preventable. Adequate control of the
cooling power of the working environment together with a
suitable form of underground acclimatisation will eliminate
it
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Forms of Global Health
My dissertation responds to recent calls for a critical medical humanities and a literature of global health by first investigating the function of literature in the development of earlier specialties in international health, with tropical medicine at the turn of the twentieth century as a key example. Scholarship in history and rhetoric of the period has described the formation of modern disciplines as a separation of scientific and literary textual traditions, predicated on the rise of distinct genres for the production of scientific knowledge, namely the scientific article, the case study, and the medical report. These genres were certainly used by key specialists of the tropics to establish a new rhetoric for description and to reduce the role of the imagination when dealing with human and geographic difference. Yet their writing on sub-Saharan Africa continued to signal a disciplinary disorder. Malaria, in particular, demanded the use of scene and figuration for the classification of space, ecologies, diseases and natives--rhetoric derived from literary genres, particularly the travelogue, memoir and novella. The result is a corpus I call malaria literature, one that includes works as disparate as Richard Burton's travel account, First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), Patrick Manson's textbook, Tropical Diseases: Manual of the Diseases of Warm Climates (1898), Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), AR Paterson's pamphlet, A Guide to the Prevention of Malaria in Kenya (1935) and Isak Dinesen's memoir, Out of Africa (1937). I read these five texts as part of an undisciplined library underwriting the construction of a modern medical specialty, and thus illustrate how the positivist turn in Africanist discourse became an incomplete effort to distance medical writing from traditions of poesis. Instead of a rupture between the literary and the scientific, I find a sustained epistemic complicity: a set of persistent knowledge-producing relations between both representational modes, where metaphors for space work with microbial notions of contagion to define disease and shape policy. Reading for such complicity, I argue, recasts tropical medicine as a confluence of scientific and literary traditions. It also complicates contemporary notions of medical literature developed after World War II, the birth of the World Health Organization, decolonization and the emergence of global health, and it enables the field of literary studies to enter into debates about the ethics of public health endeavors from a vantage point unique to the study of representations of disease
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