Covid-19: Medicine and Colonialism, Past and Present

Abstract

This essay begins in the past, with the hope of developing a different way of thinking through the transformations of the present. Many commentators and media outlets have referred to the era of the Covid-19 pandemic as ‘unprecedented’, but there is nothing unprecedented about a pandemic. What seem unprecedented are the measures which have been taken to control the public, measures that have been implemented via a series of states of emergency: the exercise of medical power through the vehicle of the neoliberal state did lead to a pattern of state and society which was unprecedented in democratic states. On the other hand, and as I will argue in this essay, this relationship was certainly not unprecedented when it came to the history of the Western state in Africa. In fact, when we take the perspective of medical history and its relationship with colonial power, we can historicise more easily the transformations which have taken place during the Covid-19 pandemic.

***

Image Credit: A medical officer taking a sample of blood from an inhabitant of Buruma Island, suffering from sleeping sickness. Photograph, 1965, after photograph 1902. In 1901, a severe sleeping sickness epidemic in Uganda claimed more than 20,000 lives. The first Uganda Sleeping Sickness Commission went out from the London School of Tropical medicine, the senior member was Dr Cuthbert Christy. It also included Dr Carmichael Low and Count Aldo Castellani. The album, which consists of copy photographs, was sent to Dr Poynter at the Wellcome Institute library by Professor Foster from the Department of Medical Microbiology in Uganda, in 1965. It was put together to record Foster's comments on the photographs sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), an infectious disease which affects the fluid of the spinal cord, causing lethargy and loss of physical function. In Uganda it was passed most virulently by the bite of the tsetse fly. Created 1965. Contributors: Uganda Sleeping Sickness Commission. Meeting (1902).  https://www.lookandlearn.com/history-images/YW029102V/A-medical-officer-taking-a-sample-of-blood-from-an-inhabitant-of-Buruma-Island-suffering-from-sleeping-sickness