Women and the Spread of Biomedical Knowledge in Colonial Uganda

My project explores the role of women in the spread of biomedical knowledge in colonial Uganda, between 1897 and 1962.  While women rarely appear in the formal medical reports generated by Uganda’s colonial doctors, biomedically trained women outnumbered men in Uganda’s mission medical institutions.  Many of these women carried primary responsibility for the maintenance of medical institutions and the biomedical education of Ugandans, and in this project I aim to more fully explore the role of these women in the development of colonial biomedicine. 

Drawing on mission and hospital archives in Europe and Uganda, I plan to focus on several different types of biomedical education, each of which was primarily the province of European and Ugandan women: maternal and child health; general health and hygiene; and leprosy treatment and prevention.  Much of the institutionalised teaching of biomedicine in Uganda was in the hands of women missionaries, for instance in the nursing and midwifery training schools that they founded and operated, and in the teaching of hygiene and preventive health measures within mission schools.  Less formally, missionary women taught Ugandans about preventive and curative health within general hospitals, dispensaries, and leprosy settlements, and on outreach ‘medical safaris’.  In turn, the Ugandan women that the missionaries trained as nurses and midwives were tasked with spreading biomedical knowledge, especially as related to the health of mothers and children.  No historian has yet undertaken a broad study of the role of women in the spread of biomedical knowledge in colonial Africa, instead focusing primarily on discrete studies of maternal and infant healthcare or the role of nurses in colonial medicine, and in this project I aim to use this broadened scope of analysis to gain a better understanding of the importance of women in the promotion of health.