Forms of Global Health
type: CreativeWork
description: My dissertation responds to recent calls for a critical medical humanities and a literature of global health by first investigating the function of literature in the development of earlier specialties in international health, with tropical medicine at the turn of the twentieth century as a key example. Scholarship in history and rhetoric of the period has described the formation of modern disciplines as a separation of scientific and literary textual traditions, predicated on the rise of distinct genres for the production of scientific knowledge, namely the scientific article, the case study, and the medical report. These genres were certainly used by key specialists of the tropics to establish a new rhetoric for description and to reduce the role of the imagination when dealing with human and geographic difference. Yet their writing on sub-Saharan Africa continued to signal a disciplinary disorder. Malaria, in particular, demanded the use of scene and figuration for the classification of space, ecologies, diseases and natives--rhetoric derived from literary genres, particularly the travelogue, memoir and novella. The result is a corpus I call malaria literature, one that includes works as disparate as Richard Burton's travel account, First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), Patrick Manson's textbook, Tropical Diseases: Manual of the Diseases of Warm Climates (1898), Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), AR Paterson's pamphlet, A Guide to the Prevention of Malaria in Kenya (1935) and Isak Dinesen's memoir, Out of Africa (1937). I read these five texts as part of an undisciplined library underwriting the construction of a modern medical specialty, and thus illustrate how the positivist turn in Africanist discourse became an incomplete effort to distance medical writing from traditions of poesis. Instead of a rupture between the literary and the scientific, I find a sustained epistemic complicity: a set of persistent knowledge-producing relations between bo…
abstract: My dissertation responds to recent calls for a critical medical humanities and a literature of global health by first investigating the function of literature in the development of earlier specialties in international health, with tropical medicine at the turn of the twentieth century as a key example. Scholarship in history and rhetoric of the period has described the formation of modern disciplines as a separation of scientific and literary textual traditions, predicated on the rise of distinct genres for the production of scientific knowledge, namely the scientific article, the case study, and the medical report. These genres were certainly used by key specialists of the tropics to establish a new rhetoric for description and to reduce the role of the imagination when dealing with human and geographic difference. Yet their writing on sub-Saharan Africa continued to signal a disciplinary disorder. Malaria, in particular, demanded the use of scene and figuration for the classification of space, ecologies, diseases and natives--rhetoric derived from literary genres, particularly the travelogue, memoir and novella. The result is a corpus I call malaria literature, one that includes works as disparate as Richard Burton's travel account, First Footsteps in East Africa (1856), Patrick Manson's textbook, Tropical Diseases: Manual of the Diseases of Warm Climates (1898), Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness (1899), AR Paterson's pamphlet, A Guide to the Prevention of Malaria in Kenya (1935) and Isak Dinesen's memoir, Out of Africa (1937). I read these five texts as part of an undisciplined library underwriting the construction of a modern medical specialty, and thus illustrate how the positivist turn in Africanist discourse became an incomplete effort to distance medical writing from traditions of poesis. Instead of a rupture between the literary and the scientific, I find a sustained epistemic complicity: a set of persistent knowledge-producing relations between bo…
author: Ikoku, Alvan A.
language: English
keywords: Malaria, Literature, Public health, Comparative literature
date published: 2013
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:44:36Z
provider: Columbia University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Columbia University

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.7916/D8SB4BGJ