Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Re-Constructing’ Indian Medicine: The Role of Caste in Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century India
- 2 The Resurgence of Indigenous Medicine in the Age of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic: South Africa Beyond the ‘Miracle’
- 3 Medicine, Medical Knowledge and Healing at the Cape of Good Hope: Khoikhoi, Slaves and Colonists
- 4 Dealing with Disease: Epizootics, Veterinarians and Public Health in Colonial Bengal, 1850–1920
- 5 Mahatma Gandhi under the Plague Spotlight
- 6 Plague Hits the Colonies: India and South Africa at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
- 7 The Blind Men and the Elephant: Imperial Medicine, Medieval Historians and the Role of Rats in the Historiography of Plague
- 8 Physicians, Forceps and Childbirth: Technological Intervention in Reproductive Health in Colonial Bengal
- 9 Not Fit for Punishment: Diagnosing Criminal Lunatics in Late Nineteenth-Century British India
- 10 Multiple Voices and Plausible Claims: Historiography and Colonial Lunatic Asylum Archives
- 11 Death and Empire: Legal Medicine in the Colonization of India and Africa
- Notes
- Index
2 - The Resurgence of Indigenous Medicine in the Age of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic: South Africa Beyond the ‘Miracle’
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- List of Contributors
- Introduction
- 1 ‘Re-Constructing’ Indian Medicine: The Role of Caste in Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century India
- 2 The Resurgence of Indigenous Medicine in the Age of the HIV/AIDS Pandemic: South Africa Beyond the ‘Miracle’
- 3 Medicine, Medical Knowledge and Healing at the Cape of Good Hope: Khoikhoi, Slaves and Colonists
- 4 Dealing with Disease: Epizootics, Veterinarians and Public Health in Colonial Bengal, 1850–1920
- 5 Mahatma Gandhi under the Plague Spotlight
- 6 Plague Hits the Colonies: India and South Africa at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
- 7 The Blind Men and the Elephant: Imperial Medicine, Medieval Historians and the Role of Rats in the Historiography of Plague
- 8 Physicians, Forceps and Childbirth: Technological Intervention in Reproductive Health in Colonial Bengal
- 9 Not Fit for Punishment: Diagnosing Criminal Lunatics in Late Nineteenth-Century British India
- 10 Multiple Voices and Plausible Claims: Historiography and Colonial Lunatic Asylum Archives
- 11 Death and Empire: Legal Medicine in the Colonization of India and Africa
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Introduction
The inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first democratically elected president of South Africa brought down the final curtain on decades of apartheid misrule, marking the beginning of a new chapter of hope for the ‘rainbow nation’. This was an achievement hailed by the international community as the political miracle of the 1990s. But to dampen the euphoria, it soon became evident that in the area of health care, the infant democracy had inherited an expensive, hospital-based, high-tech medicine that was not only inappropriate for the health needs of the majority of rural black South Africans, but also reflected a highly fragmented health system that would need more than just the defeat of apartheid to correct.
While it was generally anticipated that a major feature of South Africa's new challenge would revolve around issues of poverty eradication, job creation, crime prevention and new directions in historical writing, academic debate and public comment became increasingly dominated by the centrality of a new struggle of global proportions – the fight against HIV/AIDS. In the mid-twentieth century, cancer was the disease which carried the awe, symbolism and threat that tuberculosis possessed a hundred years before. Yet the arrival of HIV/AIDS in the second half of the century has since introduced a sinister new contestant for cancer's crown with an epidemic that poses an even greater demographic danger than tuberculosis and cancer combined.
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- Information
- Medicine and ColonialismHistorical Perspectives in India and South Africa, pp. 25 - 40Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014