of local personnel indicate that a major element was that of imparting unquestioning
obedience to superior personnel (Patton; Illiffe).
Most curative services were confined to the elite (mainly ex-patriates) with services for the
mass of the population limited to treating and preventing epidemics (Jeffery) . Efforts to treat
or prevent epidemics among the local population were conducted like military campaigns,
and interventions were dictatorial and bureaucratic (Manderson, 1999; Vaughan, 1991).
“When it came to practice.. the military campaign was the only model available in the
Colonial context... the Medical Officer became indistinguishable from the administrator in
the eyes of the African community” (Vaughan,1991, p43). For example, in Nyasaland,
“small pox” police were employed to enforce vaccination. There was prison-like isolation of
those with sleeping sickness in Belgian Congo; Africans were forbidden from washing,
collecting water, fishing or travelling on waterways that were deemed unsafe (Lyons). House
burnings and detention camps were used by Americans against cholera in the Philippines
(Manderson). The treatment of yaws in Eastern Nigeria involved compulsory stripping,
investigation and treatment, carried out with militaristic precision. Vaughan describes these
procedures as “ perfect examples of the most repressive and objectifying of colonial practices.
Colonial subjects are here being codified and numbered, deprived of clothing and of any
individual choice, they are herded into an enclosure where various agents of the state make a
direct assault on their bodies” (Vaughan, 1991, p52). The organisation of leprosy camps
similarly indicates how the P/C nature of Colonial society was reproduced in smaller groups.
After describing such organisation in some detail, Vaughan concludes that they “reflected the
larger Colonial society, and stood as microcosms of the ‘British Colony’” (Vaughan, 1991, p
88).
Initially Missionaries also provided little medical support for Africans, believing that “faith
and prayer were sufficient to ensure native health” (quotation from McCord in Good). But
Missionary provision of medical facilities for local people soon followed, much before that of
the Colonial administration, and they remained much more extensive. The Missionaries in
general were organs and facilitators of the Colonial administration, albeit in the context of
their evangelical mission. The latter led to a focus on cultural conversion as end in itself, an
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