History of health and disease in Africa

This post, on the Arc-Medieval, Global Medieval Studies blog, recounts my experiences teaching my undergraduate course, "The Black Death: Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World." Over the course of the past decade and a half, there has been a radical change in scientific understandings of the evolution and spread of *Yersinia pestis*, the causative organism of plague. This course is based on the idea that that evolutionary history can also serve as the foundation for an epidemiological and cultural history of plague, a disease that has spread in just 2000 years to all the continents of the world (save Antartica). The course focuses on the most awful plague pandemic, the Black Death, but it examines it within the whole global history of plague up to the present day. The blog includes links both to the complete syllabus and to other resources we used throughout the semester.

Malaria fand um 1900 eine enorme Beachtung durch europäische Kolonialmächte und Mediziner, galt sie doch als Bedrohung für den "weißen Mann" und sein koloniales Projekt. Malaria kam damals aber auch in Teilen Deutschlands vor. Manuela Bauche zeichnet nach, wie die Behörden in drei Gebieten des Deutschen Kaiserreichs - in Kamerun, Deutsch-Ostafrika und Ostfriesland - versuchten, gegen lokalen Widerstand Maßnahmen zur Malariabekämpfung durchzusetzen. Sie kann dabei zeigen, dass das medizinische Vorgehen sowohl in den Kolonien als auch in Deutschland mit dem Ausbau staatlicher Herrschaft, mit Rassismus und Trennung entlang von Klasse verbunden war.

This study is an analysis of the slave experience, with particular focus on the multiple characteristics of health and disease, in the Cantagalo region of the Rio de Janeiro Paraíba Valley, an important coffee plantation area, between the years 1815 and 1888. Historiography has approached the topic from various perspectives, examining the multiple characteristics of slaves’ social universes in different Atlantic contexts through study of slaves’  daily lives, family arrangements and their different social universes.
Researchers from various fields of knowledge have studied debates on slave health and the causes of diseases particular to slaves, revealing new perspectives on a historicity much more complex than previously thought. Through an analysis of the diseases and health conditions of slaves that lived on the coffee plantations in the Cantagalo region of the Rio de Janeiro Paraíba Valley, this study examines the slaves’  experience with regard to diseases and the respective actions taken by slave owners to treat sick slaves. Through the analyses of post-mortem inventory documents, medical fees, manuals and medical reports, this thesis investigates the knowledge produced, systematized, and made available for the care of the slave population within the social context of the rapid expansion of the coffee economy, characterized by demographic growth and the increase of the Atlantic slave trade. In this sense, this study reveals worlds of slavery within the important social landscape of Imperial Rio de Janeiro, in which slave labor was a key part of numerous changes permeating the experiences and social relations between slaves and their owners.

Section III
. Science meets historical disease environments
7
Environments of Health and Disease in Tropical Africa before the Colonial Era
Gérard Chouin ORCID ID: 0000-0001-8885-6919
Abstract
A long-standing narrative that has its origins, in part, in early modern European travel narratives entwines Africa, diseased environments, and death. By probing these seventeenth-century narratives as historical sources and reflecting critically on their contents, however, this chapter reveals a Eurocentric “smokescreen” that hides a much more complex picture. African understanding of the “environment” – and of disease causation – was far more extensive than how we think of it today: it embodied not only the physical landscape but also the spiritual and social realms. Managing the multiple spheres that comprised the environment meant that pre-modern Africans had developed a complex variety of disease mitigation techniques, each targeting the suspected origin of disease. The chapter also includes an exploration of the author’s working hypothesis about the making, demise, or subsistence malaria and plague in selected regions of the African continent’s environment, demonstrating how working cross-disciplinarily and bringing together evidence from the humanities and the sciences – including research on ancient DNA – allows us to slowly build a clearer picture of the intricate relationship between diseases and the environment in the African past.

This dissertation will discuss the analytical possibilities - for the universe of the slavery thematic in Brazil - approaches about slavery, death and disease. With the analysis of the diseases that used to struck the captives of the Irajá and Candelária areas, it is reached to point out the precarious life conditions on those Rio de Janeiro settlements, between the years of 1809 and 1831. Having as supports serial sources as parishes obit books, post-mortem inventories, medical records and chroniclers memorials, it was possible to rebuilt the historical processes scenarios involving slave mortality. Moreover, the diseases study of certain population group may enlarger the perception of various dimensions of the social life, both in the slave quarters of large and small Rio de Janeiro breeding stocks as in the complex urban settings located in the heart of the slavery city. Therefore, the analysis of these data makes clear that the deaths causes were directly related to the particularities of each environment, thus also revealing how the diseases analysis would reflect the experience of mortality of an especific group. Thus, it is proposed to demonstrate how the dialogue with the regions analyzed provide compelling evidences about how the slaves lived and coped with the experience of illness and death.

Nombre d'auteurs ont remis en cause la manière de l'OMS de conduire la question du SIDA au cours des années 1980 et 1990, sans expliquer de manière substantielle pourquoi l'OMS a été sujette à des erreurs. Nous avons tenté de comprendre dans quelles mesures les divergences autour du projet des « soins de santé primaires » adopté à Alma-Ata en 1978 influencèrent le leadership de l'OMS dans la direction mondiale de la lutte contre le VIH/SIDA. Il ressort que ces clivages resurgirent à différentes périodes de la lutte notamment après la mise en place du Programme global de lutte contre le SIDA au sein de l'OMS, au moment de la décentralisation du Programme global dans les différentes régions de l'OMS, tout comme au moment de la création et de l'action de l'ONUSIDA. Ce qui était surtout en jeu était la recherche du pouvoir de contrôler l'orientation de la lutte contre le SIDA, d'une part, et, d'autre part, celle des ressources y afférentes.

While both human and animal trypanosomiasis continue to present as major human and animal public health constraints globally, detailed analyses of trypanosome wildlife reservoir hosts remain sparse. African animal trypanosomiasis (AAT) affects both livestock and wildlife carrying a significant risk of spillover and cross-transmission of species and strains between populations. Increased human activity together with pressure on land resources is increasing wildlife–livestock–human infections. Increasing proximity between human settlements and grazing lands to wildlife reserves and game parks only serves to exacerbate zoonotic risk. Communities living and maintaining livestock on the fringes of wildlife-rich ecosystems require to have in place methods of vector control for prevention of AAT transmission and for the treatment of their livestock. Major Trypanosoma spp. include Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense, Trypanosoma brucei gambiense, and Trypanosoma cruzi, pathogenic for humans, and Trypanosoma vivax, Trypanosoma congolense, Trypanosoma evansi, Trypanosoma brucei brucei, Trypanosoma dionisii, Trypanosoma thomasbancrofti, Trypanosma elephantis, Trypanosoma vegrandis, Trypanosoma copemani, Trypanosoma irwini, Trypanosoma copemani, Trypanosoma gilletti, Trypanosoma theileri, Trypanosoma godfreyi, Trypansoma simiae, and Trypanosoma (Megatrypanum) pestanai. Wildlife hosts for the trypansomatidae include subfamilies of Bovinae, Suidae, Pantherinae, Equidae, Alcephinae, Cercopithecinae, Crocodilinae, Pteropodidae, Peramelidae, Sigmodontidae, and Meliphagidae. Wildlife species are generally considered tolerant to trypanosome infection following centuries of coexistence of vectors and wildlife hosts. Tolerance is influenced by age, sex, species, and physiological condition and parasite challenge. Cyclic transmission through Glossina species occurs for T. congolense, T. simiae, T. vivax, T. brucei, and T. b. rhodesiense, T. b. gambiense, and within Reduviid bugs for T. cruzi. T. evansi is mechanically transmitted, and T. vixax is also commonly transmitted by biting flies including tsetse. Wildlife animal species serve as long-term reservoirs of infection, but the delicate acquired balance between trypanotolerance and trypanosome challenge can be disrupted by an increase in challenge and/or the introduction of new more virulent species into the ecosystem. There is a need to protect wildlife, animal, and human populations from the infectious consequences of encroachment to preserve and protect these populations. In this review, we explore the ecology and epidemiology of Trypanosoma spp. in wildlife.

This course explores African ideas of health and disease in the modern historical era (1500-Present) through a variety of human and animal diseases. The course repeatedly asks students to consider (and reconsider) why African societies articulate and promote health and disease models in ways distinct from and influenced by western societies. What factors determine this? How do these practices and ideas impact individuals, communities, and entire societies? How and why do ideas about health and disease change over time? What factors prompt change and how is change negotiated or challenged in the midst, for example, of new disease outbreaks?

Students will wrestle with these questions through a variety of texts focusing on many disparate health structures and disease environments. This course begins with a series of overviews about health and disease in the pre-colonial and colonial era. It assesses and explores how Africans attempt to manage their own health systems and manipulate them to changing circumstances. Therapeutics, medicinal treatments, disease management, and other topics will be used to lay the foundation to understand how the questions addressed in the above paragraph are applied to diseases like leprosy, cholera, HIV/AIDS , influenza, rabies, and rinderpest.

This paper offers a new perspective on historical understandings of the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body, by studying the way that British explorers of tropical Africa drank alcohol and wrote about drink between c.1850 and c.1910. We demonstrate that alcohol was simultaneously classified as a medicinal, a preventative and a pleasurable drink, shaped by competing medical theories, but that distinctions between these different roles were highly blurred. We also show how many explorers thought certain drinks helped to protect white bodies from the effects of tropical diseases. While popular amongst travellers, these views came under growing scrutiny in the latter part of the nineteenth century, reflecting both changing scientific views about the relationship between alcohol, climate and the body and the development of a much larger European presence in tropical Africa. However, even those who opposed tropical drinking often supported the use of other stimulants and vi...

This article presents the first reflections of the research in progress regarding the enslaved experiences relative to the illness and the death. Through a approach compared on unhealthy, enslaved mortality and sociabilities in Brazil and Angola we analyze some characteristics of these social configurations.

Abbiamo aperto il cantiere per un numero di "Zapruder" dedicato a #epidemie e #conflitti, curato da Giovanni Pietrangeli, Luisa Renzo (PhD) e da me. Questo è l'abstract che abbiamo approvato nell'assemblea annuale di Storie in movimento/Zapruder.

Il numero uscirà nel primo quadrimestre del 2023. Ci fa piacere condividere il progetto e raccogliere stimoli, contatti e suggerimenti per costruire l'indice. Grazie a chi vorrà partecipare.
#history #storia #epidemie #covid19 #riviste #journals

In this article I analyze the experiences of slavery built from the relations between land, labor and the slave protests consolidated in the coffee plantations landscapes of the Vale do Paraíba fluminense. I problematize aspects of the slavery dimensions and the consolidation of a plantation economy, structured in the middle of economic competitiveness in coffee production, marked by the constant demand for captive labor and also the need to deal with the issues inherent to the survival of the slave system. In this context the episodes of escapes of slaves had to be commonplace, such as conflicts and negotiations between masters and their slaves, that were certainly part of the daily life of the population located in the historical region of the Vale do Paraíba.

While both human and animal trypanosomiasis continue to present as major human and animal public health constraints globally, detailed analyses of trypanosome wildlife reservoir hosts remain sparse. African animal trypanosomiasis (AAT) affects both livestock and wildlife carrying a significant risk of spillover and cross-transmission of species and strains between populations. Increased human activity together with pressure on land resources is increasing wildlife–livestock–human infections. Increasing proximity between human settlements and grazing lands to wildlife reserves and game parks only serves to exacerbate zoonotic risk. Communities living and maintaining livestock on the fringes of wildlife-rich ecosystems require to have in place methods of vector control for prevention of AAT transmission and for the treatment of their livestock. Major Trypanosoma spp. include Trypanosoma brucei rhodesiense, Trypanosoma brucei gambiense, and Trypanosoma cruzi, pathogenic for humans, and...

En 1901, la première léproserie éthiopienne voit le jour à Harar sous le nom de « Saint-Antoine ». Cette initiative missionnaire, consolidée par la présence du docteur Jean Féron, marque le point de départ d’une nouvelle conception de la maladie. Au lieu d’une punition divine, la lèpre est perçue comme une maladie et, progressivement, elle devient une priorité publique nationale. Missionnaire, médecin de la léproserie ou représentant de l’État éthiopien, chacun construit sa distinction entre un environnement sain ou malsain. Pourtant, si les différents protagonistes s’attribuent la légitimité de gérer la lèpre, c’est à la maladie que revient la place d’actrice principale tant elle sert et révèle à la fois les enjeux environnementaux, nationaux et impériaux. Ainsi, interroger la manière dont la lèpre a été pensée, gérée et institutionnalisée au cours du xxe siècle éthiopien permet d’apporter un nouveau regard sur le processus de modernisation étatique dans lequel Hailé Sélassié Ier avait décidé d’ancrer l’Éthiopie.

Social factors play key roles in health outcomes, both in the present and in the past. Many models of health data suggest that as economic inequalities grow, so too do health inequalities. In fact, many scholars take for granted a direct relationship between health and wealth, assuming that skeletons exhibiting poor health most likely represented those with the least wealth.

Yet, this over-simplified model for health patterning in past communities does not explain how large states continue to grow and function despite ever-increasing economic inequalities. At some point, the poor health of the majority of individuals would make large scale building projects, military expansion, and re-distributive farming unsustainable. 

This paper uses Deir el-Medina as a case study in the explanation of health patterning in antiquity. Using osteological and textual evidence, I identify how health care and disease both would have impacted health patterns. Health care---in the form of provisioning and sick leave---exacerbates health inequalities. Yet, specific diseases such as malaria acted as health equalizers, impacting the broader community regardless of social status or health care access.

Future studies on health inequalities in antiquity should consider how these social and biological factors overlap to pattern health inequalities in ways that explain the growth and collapse of a civilization.