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Colonial Medicine Essay

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Like any other structured system, colonial medicine left quite a number of legacies in the world today. Medicine was a very important tool used during colonization and as Keller, in his article Geographies or power, legacies of mistrust: Colonial medicine in the global present, argues: “biomedicine is a peculiarly western idiom despite its Universalist claims” (Keller, 2006). This essay will explore two of the many legacies of colonial medicine in the world today namely undermining traditional healers and mistrust of the health systems in place.
Firstly, the undermining of traditional healers is a legacy that was left by colonial medicine. As Keller highlights: “the early intersection of colonial medicine with religious mission work demonstrates how such conversion efforts sought to seduce colonized populations by presenting biomedicine as a superior form of knowledge about body and nature” (Keller, 2006). Bivins in Coming ‘Home’to (post) Colonial Medicine: Treating Tropical Bodies in Post-War Britain, states that: “examining colonial practice has revealed a broader range of historical actors, including missionaries and indigenous healers, leaders, communities and patients” (Bivins, 2013) . Before the arrival of the …show more content…

Packward and Vaughan, in their article, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness, posit: “missionary medicine focused on the control of populations for physical as well as moral health. “Healing, for medical missionaries, was part of a program of social and moral engineering through which ‘Africa’ would be saved” (Packward & Vaughan, 1992). This legacy lives on and examples of this are clearly visible in many African societies today. In Africa generally, traditional medicine is often times viewed and regarded as satanic or

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