Medical Missionaries and Colonial Knowledge in West Africa and Europe, 1885-1914: Purity, Health and Cleanliness (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies)

This open access book offers an entangled history of hygiene by showing how knowledge of purity, health and cleanliness was shaped by evangelical medical missionaries and their encounters with people in West Africa. By tracing the interactions and negotiations of six Basel Mission doctors, who practised on the Gold Coast and in Cameroon from 1885 to 1914, the author demonstrates how notions of religious purity, scientific health and colonial cleanliness came together in the making of hygiene during the age of High Imperialism. The heyday of evangelical medical missions abroad coincided with the emergence of tropical medicine as a scientific discipline during what became known as the Scramble for Africa. This book reveals that these projects were intertwined and that hygiene played an important role in all three of them. While most historians have examined modern hygiene as a European, bourgeois and scientific phenomenon, the author highlights both the colonial and the religious fabric of hygiene, which continues to shape our understanding of purity, health and cleanliness to this day. Acknowledgements Cover Image Contents Abbreviations List of Figures 1 Introduction 1.1 Thematic Introduction 1.2 Research Review 1.2.1 Mission History and Medicine 1.2.2 History of Science and Tropical Medicine 1.2.3 Colonial History and Knowledge 1.3 Research Aims and Methodological Reflections 1.3.1 Spaces of Knowledge 1.3.2 Source Material 1.3.3 Structure of the Book References Part I Spaces of Knowledge and Meanings of Hygiene in the Nineteenth Century 2 The Religious Space of Knowledge: The Basel Mission, Worldwide Webs and Pietist Purity 2.1 Pietists, Patricians and the Social Question in Basel 2.1.1 Wurttemberg Pietism 2.1.2 The Basel Patricians 2.1.3 The Social Question 2.1.4 The Basel City Mission 2.2 The Web of Mission 2.2.1 Worldwide Webs 2.2.2 Grassroots Movement 2.2.3 Women and Children on a Mission 2.2.4 Beyond the City 2.3 Purity, Healing and Death 2.3.1 Pietist Purity 2.3.2 Healing and Deliverance Theology 2.3.3 Deadly Mission References 3 The Scientific Space of Knowledge: Medical Missionaries, Tropical Medicine and the Age of Hygiene 3.1 Medicine, Missionaries and the Microscope 3.1.1 Scientific Medicine and Pietism 3.1.2 The Question of a Medical Mission 3.1.3 The Medical Research Expedition of 1882–1883 3.1.4 The Institutionalisation of Mission Medicine 3.2 The Formation of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene 3.2.1 The Question of Acclimatisation 3.2.2 Scientific Networks 3.2.3 Miasma, Germs and Tropical Hygiene 3.3 The Age of Hygiene 3.3.1 The Hygiene Movement in Basel and Beyond 3.3.2 Topographies of Dirt and Disease 3.3.3 The New Godliness of Hygiene References 4 The Colonial Space of Knowledge: The Medical Mission in West Africa, Imperial Entanglements and Colonial Cleanliness 4.1 Missionaries and Knowledge in a Colonial World 4.1.1 Civilising Colonialism 4.1.2 Basel’s Colonial Entanglements 4.1.3 The Popularity of Missionary Knowledge 4.2 The Basel Mission in West Africa 4.2.1 Slavery and West Indian Christians on the Gold Coast 4.2.2 Cooperation and Conflict in German Cameroon 4.2.3 Economics, Linguistics and Education 4.3 Mission Medicine and Health in the Colonies 4.3.1 The Basel Medical Mission in West Africa 4.3.2 Growing Interest in “Indigenous Hygiene” References Part II Negotiations of Hygiene “on the Margins” 1885–1914 5 Locating Filth: Sin, Syphilis and the Path to Purity 5.1 On a Hygiene Mission in West Africa 5.2 The Insistence on Syphilis 5.3 Bodily Knowledge, Individualism and Spiritual Rebirth References 6 Creating Pure Spaces: Edifices, Domesticity and the Temperance Movement 6.1 Architectural Means 6.2 Domestic Safe Havens 6.3 Combatting Spirits References 7 Subverting Purity: Magic, Medical Pluralism and Tenacious Syncretism 7.1 Of Healers and Doctors 7.2 The Mission Doctors as Purity Hazards 7.3 Tenacious Syncretism References Part III Reverberations of Hygiene 1885–1914 8 Shaping Colonial Science: Missionary Challenges, Racial Segregation and the Locality of Science 8.1 Trials from the Periphery 8.2 The Question of Segregation 8.3 The Locality of Science References 9 Soothing Weak Nerves: Tropical Anxieties, Missionary Guidance and Moral Hygiene 9.1 Resurging Climatic Fears 9.2 Missionary Advice on Moral Hygiene 9.3 Weak Nerves and Missionary Resilience 9.4 Boundaries of Colonial Rule References 10 Materialising Hygiene: Remedies, Commodities and Images 10.1 Materia Medica 10.2 The Commodification of Hygiene 10.3 Beyond the Colonial Gaze References 11 Conclusion 11.1 Metropolitan Reflections 11.2 Lines of Hygiene 11.3 Shifts of Meanings References Appendix Short Biographies Alfred Eckhardt (BV 1139) Rudolf Fisch (BV 985) Arthur Häberlin (BV 1674) Friedrich Hey (BV 1261) Karl Huppenbauer (BV 2090) Ernst Mähly Theodor Müller (BV 1808b) Hermann Vortisch (BV 1537) Bibliography Index