When I was first asked to write this paper, I was instructed that the whole field of social history was open to my purview and that my efforts should be directed to future accomplishments and not past glories. My first impulse was to wander over to the library and try to determine in fact what social history was in order to bring some boundaries to my paper. After looking through several of the standard reference works on the social sciences and their definitions of social history, I began to feel that I was not the only person unsure of the boundaries between social/political/economic/intellectual/religious history. Furthermore the request to look only into the future and not the past left me feeling out of sorts given my historian's training. Thus, I decided instead to try to examine several of the many areas of the social history of Africa which are largely unworked or need examination in more depth.

The medical history of Africa is an area in which many fruitful and significant opportunities exist for further research. Work in this field has been done in several different countries and the results are beginning to appear in a growing number of books and articles. Yet there are still a great many important topics and geographic areas which remain to be explored. These range from local issues such as the sleeping sickness epidemic which ravaged the Zaire River basin near the turn of the century, to the regional differences of experiences with epidemic disease in early colonial Africa, especially those differences between East and West Africa (Feierman, 1985).