Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T02:14:57.005Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 10 - The Legacies of Belgian Tropical Medicine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2021

Jacques Pépin
Affiliation:
Université de Sherbrooke, Canada
Get access

Summary

Chapter 10 reviews the history of colonial medicine in the Belgian Congo. In this huge colony, Belgium established arguably the best healthcare system in tropical Africa, with more than 2,500 institutions of all kinds. As in the French colonies, there were large-scale disease control interventions using injectable drugs. A network of public health laboratories, including those in Léopoldville and Stanleyville, are ruled out as being instrumental in the early propagation of HIV. The brilliant career of Lucien Van Hoof, the colony’s chief medical officer for twelve years who also did cutting-edge research on the control of sleeping sickness, is highlighted. The rather debatable medical practices in Léopoldville’s STD clinics are examined; ‘free women’ were forced to undergo a long series of intravenous injections if they were thought, often wrongly, to have had syphilis previously. An outbreak among these women of ‘inoculation hepatitis’ was recognised in the early 1950s. An analysis of changes in the incidence of tuberculosis in various parts of the Belgian Congo in the 1950s suggests that HIV was already driving this increasing incidence in Léopoldville. A recent study identified several routes for the iatrogenic transmission of blood-borne viruses during the colonial and early post-colonial era.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Origins of AIDS , pp. 200 - 232
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×