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Title:Through marsh and mountain: tropical acclimatization, health and disease and the CMS mission to Uganda, 1875-1920
Author:Endfield, GeorginaISNI
Year:2010
Periodical:Journal of Eastern African Studies
Volume:4
Issue:1
Pages:61-90
Language:English
Geographic terms:East Africa
Uganda
Subjects:missions
climate
health
tropical diseases
External link:https://doi.org/10.1080/17531050903550124
Abstract:This paper employs the letters, journals and books written by representatives of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) - charged with establishing a mission to Uganda - to explore the ways in which missionary discourses were framed by, and contributed to, contemporary debates over tropical acclimatization and healthiness of place. Attention first focuses on the degree to which advice produced for and by pioneering missionaries travelling to Uganda reflected prevailing Western stereotypes of the tropics as pestilential and hazardous for European constitutions. Attention then turns to the means through which missionaries' interactions with the on-the-ground environments and pre-existing indigenous knowledge systems and practices may have contributed to a more nuanced understanding of the salubrity of the region, and further posited Uganda as a relatively healthful place. The role that missionaries and local assistants across Uganda played in the investigation of a series of climate and disease events which affected the broader East African region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is then illustrated. Finally, the degree to which a series of climatic, pathological and ecological events around the turn of the twentieth century, coupled with colonial intervention, may have exacerbated the spread of epidemic disease, specifically trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), is elucidated. Bibliogr., notes, ref., sum. [Journal abstract]
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