Papers by Adedamola Adetiba
This thesis is a social history of malaria in southwestern Nigeria. It contributes to the burgeon... more 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...
This paper probes into the wide array of networks that shaped malaria control in the colonial Lag... more This paper probes into the wide array of networks that shaped malaria control in the colonial Lagos during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It highlights the role of tropical locales in the production of medical knowledge, emphasizing the ways colonial doctors read and contributed to imperial discourses on tropical diseases. Existing histories suggest the existence of wide-ranging inclusive and complex circuits of knowledge production networks of European institutions and persons who ventured into the field of tropical medicine. Malaria research undertaken in Lagos between the 1890s and the early 1900s generated key ideas and findings that impacted on imperial medical science. Attempts to deal with malaria also created sites for contestations between the imperial blueprint that emphasized racial segregation as a disease control measure from the local view that regarded outright segregation as economically suicidal, advocating instead for environmental contro
Social History of Medicine, 2021
Summary This article examines the role of African chiefs in the administration of colonial medici... more Summary This article examines the role of African chiefs in the administration of colonial medicine in rural south-western Nigeria, emphasising the adaptive ways they navigated a difficult position between colonial medical authorities and indigenous medical legitimacy. Whereas colonial authorities expected chiefs to enforce medical policies and to encourage their subjects to use medical facilities, Africans wanted chiefs to defend and promote Yoruba medical and religious practices that colonial authorities and missionaries usually undermined. By supporting established African healing systems, chiefs stood to gain political mileage and favour with traditional healers. Furthermore, we argue that although African chiefs cooperated with the government in implementing health policies, they had a difficult relationship with sanitary inspectors who enforced sanitary regulations in ways that bred resentment. In the 1940s, Yoruba chiefs advocated for more rural health services, perhaps to pa...
Modern Africa: Politics, History and Society
This article explores an early episode in the history of tropical medicine in colonial Lagos, Bri... more This article explores an early episode in the history of tropical medicine in colonial Lagos, British West Africa. It probes into the activities and outputs of scientists who operated within the Medical Research Institute (MRI) as a way to further complicate the agendas of tropical medicine. Scientists of the MRI undertook biomedical experimentation with a profound understanding of metropolitan and local imperatives as both determined the extent to which they contributed to popular discourses. The present paper explores the extent to which metropole-colony relations triggered local scientists at the MRI to resort to all available means, including human experimentation, in the course of ambitious scientific projects. In certain other contexts, international and local motivations converged to sway the ambivalent postures of colonial scientists to biomedical experimentation.
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Papers by Adedamola Adetiba