Ayodeji Adegbite
Coleman Dissertation Fellow (2023-2024)
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, UW–Madison
Africa’s Biomedical Public: African Medical Practitioners in the Environment, Politics and Science of Disease Control in Africa
Beginning in the late 19th century and through the first five decades of the 20th century, “Western biomedicine” became institutionalized in Africa. Historians of colonial medicine and empire have studied how Africans were ordered and subjectified by biomedicine and public health measures. This paper takes a different approach to the history of biomedicine in Africa by examining the role that a community of Western-trained Nigerian medical practitioners played in its development and institutionalization. I show how Nigerian medical practitioners from Southwestern Nigeria challenged, adopted and coopted Yoruba healing indigenous practices and “Western biomedicine” in the creation of a “Nigerian biomedical public” — a new generation of Africans who appropriated practices of modern biomedicine on their own terms and utilized them toward their own social, economic, and political purposes. Writing the history of global health through the prism of Nigerian medical practitioners addresses part of the limitations imposed by what Nolwazi Mkhwanazi called the “single story” popular in medical anthropological accounts, where health interventions in Africa simply fail due to cultural difference and the absence of good governance and health facilities.
Ayodeji Adegbite is a Ph.D. candidate in the Program in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology in the Department of History at the UW–Madison. His research interests include the history of medicine, science, global health, and the environment, with a focus on colonial and post-colonial Africa. He received a B.A. and M.A. in History and International Studies and Peace and Development Studies, respectively, at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria. He also received an M.A. in History of Science, Medicine, and Technology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
*Events currently open only to 2023-24 fellows due to space concerns; please contact IRH at info@irh.wisc.edu to be added to a cancellation list for in-person events.*