'Elementary Principles' and 'Ordinary Cleanliness': Women's and Children's Welfare Programs and the Transmission and Adaptation of Biomedical Ideas in Colonial Uganda

While women rarely appear in formal biomedical reports from Uganda, or indeed in biomedical reports from across Africa during the colonial period, biomedically trained women outnumbered men in most of Uganda’s medical institutions.  Most of these institutions were run by missionaries, and they provided education as well as healthcare.  Women were less frequent attendees of general hospitals and less prominent recipients of formal biomedical education, and so the predominance of women as purveyors of biomedical knowledge, and, along with children, as the major recipients of biomedical education, has not been recognized.  This paper will look beyond the formal medical schools where a select minority trained, to settings where informal education about health and hygiene took place, in order to better understand the role of gender in the transmission and adaptation of biomedical knowledge in Uganda.  

In particular, this paper will examine missionary women and the Ugandan women that they trained as they attempted to impart knowledge about such subjects as healthy child-rearing, nutrition, basic biomedical care, and hygiene, through networks of home visits and occasional ante- and post-natal attendances at rural welfare centers.  Drawing on archival research and interviews with Ugandan and European midwives, nurses, welfare workers, and local elders, this paper will explore the kinds of knowledge that these women prioritized and attempted to spread; some of the ways in which local populations responded to, adapted, and rejected this knowledge and the social, medical, and religious agendas of its promoters; and some of the factors that shaped these responses.