Black Death, White Medicine: Bubonic Plague and the Politics of Public Health in Colonial Senegal, 1914-1945

From Book News, Inc.
In 20th century Senegal, bubonic plague--like the plague of HIV/AIDS that followed it--symbolizes the inequalities of public health within the world economic system. Echenberg (African history, McGill U.) argues that an epidemic cannot be understood exclusively as a medical event; his study also examines the social and political contexts of bubonic plague in colonial Senegal and finds there an ideological contest between conqueror and conquered: a triumphalist Enlightenment rationality that empowered Western biomedical science while rejecting the applied knowledge of local healing specialists. Although critical of the record of French colonial medicine, Echenberg also expresses sympathy for the challenges faced by health officials of the day.Copyright © 2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Book Description
Looking at the bubonic plague in colonial Senegal between 1914 and 1945, the author examines how colonizer and colonized changed their perceptions of the epidemic over time.

About the Author
MYRON ECHENBERG is an associate professor at McGill University, where he teaches African history. His Colonial Conscripts: the Tirailleurs Senegalais in French West Africa, 1857-1960 won the Herskovits Award of the African Studies Association for the outstanding original scholarly work published during 1991.


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Looking at the bubonic plague in colonial Senegal between 1914 and 1945, the author examines how colonizer and colonized changed their perceptions of the epidemic over time.


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