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HISTORICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY AND INFECTIOUS DISEASE PROCESSES IN AFRICA*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 May 2013

James L. A. Webb Jr.
James L. A. Webb Jr.*
Affiliation:
Colby College
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Abstract

This article outlines the historical development in African studies of the sub-discipline of historical epidemiology and the contemporary challenges of understanding infectious disease processes that require integrating biomedical and historical knowledge. It suggests that Africanist historians can play a significant role in collaborative and multidisciplinary research in this field by exploring the histories of disease processes and interventions, and thereby contributing to improvements in public health practice and outcomes.

Keywords

HealthdiseasehistoriographyHIVAIDS
Type
JAH Forum: Health and Illness in African History
Information
The Journal of African History , Volume 54 , Issue 1 , March 2013 , pp. 3 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 Hirsch, A., Handbook of Geographical and Historical Pathology, Volume I, Acute Infective Diseases and Volume II, Chronic Infective, Toxic, Parasitic, Septic, and Constitutional Diseases (London, 1883 and 1885)Google Scholar.

2 E. H. Ackerknecht was a scholar with wide-ranging interests and competencies, and he made important contributions to the field of historical epidemiology. His seminal works include Malaria in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1760–1900, supplement to the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 4 (Baltimore, MD, 1945; repr., New York, 1977); and History and Geography of the Most Important Diseases (New York, 1965).

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6 Other scholars continued to explore the transmission of disease from Africa to the New World: see, for example, Alden, D. and Miller, J. C., ‘Out of Africa: the slave trade and the transmission of smallpox to Brazil, 1560–1831’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 18:2 (1987), 195–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and, more recently, McNeill, J. R., Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914 (New York, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 McNeill, W. H., Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY, 1976)Google Scholar. On the significance of McNeill's book for the field of global environmental history, see Webb, J. L. A. Jr., ‘Historical epidemiology and environmental history’, Environmental History, 10:4 (2005), 761–2Google Scholar.

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In 1979, Patterson compiled an extensive bibliography of studies on infectious diseases in Africa, and in 1981, he published a monograph on health in colonial Ghana: K. D. Patterson (comp.), Infectious Diseases in Twentieth-Century Africa: A Bibliography of Their Distribution and Consequences (Waltham, MA, 1979); and Patterson, K. D., Health in Colonial Ghana: Disease, Medicine, and Socio-Economic Change, 1900–1955 (Waltham, MA, 1981)Google Scholar.

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14 The literatures on the political economy of health and the social history of medicine are large and nuanced, and lie well beyond the scope of this article.

15 Webb, J. L. A. Jr. and Giles-Vernick, T., ‘An introduction to global health in Africa’, in Giles-Vernick, T. and Webb, J. L. A. Jr. (eds.), Global Health in Africa: Historical Perspectives on Disease Control (Athens, OH, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

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19 An outstanding example is Lyons, M., The Colonial Disease: A Social History of Sleeping Sickness in Northern Zaire, 1900–1940 (New York, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Webb, J. L. A. Jr., ‘The first large-scale use of synthetic insecticide for malaria control in tropical Africa: lessons from Liberia, 1945–1962’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 66:3 (2011), 347–76CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

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22 Recently, researchers have discovered a hitherto unknown ‘cryptic subspecies’ of anopheline mosquito in Burkina Faso. Although the significance of the role of the recently discovered mosquito in malaria transmission has not been established, if it is shown to be a significant vector, this would represent a significant challenge to the contemporary malaria control and elimination campaigns: see Riehle, M. M. et al. , ‘A cryptic subgroup of Anopheles gambiae is highly susceptible to human malaria parasites’, Science, 331:6017 (2011), 596–8CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

23 See, for example, Packard, R. M., The Making of a Tropical Disease: A Short History of Malaria (Baltimore, MD, 2007)Google Scholar. Other important work is in progress. The Rockefeller Foundation has funded a project to investigate the relationship between the introduction of hybrid maize and outbreaks of malaria in highland Ethiopia. Over the course of five years of research, a multidisciplinary team of researchers has produced a wealth of information that casts new light on epidemiological assumptions about ecological continuity over time. James C. McCann, Anthony Kiszewski, and Richard Pollack, personal communications with the author, 15–16 December 2011.