Preprint Articles

This article opens a window on anti-cancer drug research using “traditional Chinese medicine” (TCM) in Mao-period China. Drawing on a database of over 120 scientific journal articles from that period, it discusses how physician-researchers mined Chinese materia medica for cancer cures in the context of political and practical imperatives. Some results were productive, though the interpretive possibilities of assigning credit to traditional/Chinese or Western/modern medicine in any particular instance remained broad. The article examines how extending or withholding traditionality to substances that made a seeming transition from that realm to modern clinical use was negotiated in different instances. It also locates Chinese pharmaceutical research, for the first time, in the larger context of global bioprospecting for anti-cancer drugs, which was characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s.

The 1950s were a decade of remarkable advances in tuberculosis research globally, with Kenya emerging as a key site for developing new control and treatment regimens. Yet historical source material and consequently medical histories are largely silent on the context of anticolonial war in which this work took place. This article argues that disease control efforts in postwar Kenya must be examined in the context of the Mau Mau uprising and uses photographs to probe the intersection of politics and health. Examining photographs of late colonial TB control initiatives, it highlights the stark contrast between these images and the concurrent realities and imageries of Mau Mau. Produced in contexts of omnipresent violence and deep uncertainty about Kenya’s future, these medical photographs were instruments of colonial power and Western hegemony. Even as they reproduced a generic developmentalist vision of medical knowledge production, the specificities of Kenya’s late colonial struggle reverberate throughout these images.

This article uses a close reading of clinical photographs to demonstrate how ambiguities surrounding the ostensibly scopic nature of race—that is, race as both conspicuous and measurable based on surface appearance—functioned in the medical terrain in segregationist South Africa, and beyond. By analyzing both archival and published materials produced and used during the mid-twentieth century at Cape Town’s medical school, the author argues that race operated as an “elusive signifier” in that it was simultaneously conspicuous and elided in visual and written form. As such, the material was legible to local South African audiences, situated within a context of increasingly explicit racial segregation, but also able to circulate across the globe as universal medical knowledge. The author shows how the coterminous presence and absence of race aligned with sociopolitical tensions, scientific attitudes, “commonsense” assumptions, and the international aspirations of local medical professionals in the Cape region.

This special issue explores the opportunities and challenges of using photographs to write histories of health and healing in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Since the latenineteenth-century introduction of photographic technology to Africa, it has been employed in a myriad of manners and settings related to health. Yet while photographs abound in medical histories of Africa—typically as provocative yet unexplored cover photos or illustrations—historians of health and healing in Africa have not systematically utilized photographs as historical sources that augment or contest analyses based on written sources. This special issue introduction proposes a set of tools that establish the intersection of visual, medical and African history as a productive analytic: (1) confronting the fiction of photographic transparency through contextualization, (2) close viewing of and ethical engagement with images, and (3) centering the fictions of photographic truth as historical subjects in themselves. These tools are demonstrated with reference to the contributions in the special issue, dealing, variously with colonial-era Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and South Africa.

In 1977, self-proclaimed cancer doctor Milan Brych set up a clinic in the Cook Islands offering to cure 80 percent of terminal patients. Patients from Australia and New Zealand flew to Rarotonga to have the $12,000 treatment. Most died within months and were buried in the Rarotonga cemetery, locally known as the “Brych Yard”: Brych had not discovered a cure for cancer but was a quack and con man. This article looks at this notable case of cancer quackery and examines the associations that facilitated Brych’s activities. It argues that, given the late twentieth-century context of an established, influential medical profession well-policed by government regulation, the web of interests that facilitated Brych’s activities was critical in enabling him to achieve the scope and influence that he did. Both modern quackery and its brethren misinformation can be considered as an activity of an interlinked network of diverse, but complementary, interests.

From the earliest days of the Swiss Mission Romande’s establishment in Southeast Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, photography, just becoming an accessible technology for the committed amateur, held a role in the everyday lives of missionaries. Patrick Harries has argued that Swiss missionaries’ photographs of unfamiliar landscapes and cultural practices in this region “conserved and diffused the mixture of apprehension and excitement with which [they] viewed Africa.” This paper takes up this claim to consider how photography and photographic ways of seeing mediated, and reflected shifts in, the specific ambivalence that missionaries felt toward the role of medicine in evangelistic work and the establishment of the mission within this region. The author suggests that by capturing African audiences in photographs, missionaries aimed to communicate the value of the “medical mission” for the real and imagined European audiences of those photographs.