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| Title: | Dr. John Farrell Easmon: Medical Professionalism and Colonial Racism in the Gold Coast, 1856-1900 |
| Author: | Patton (jr), Adell |
| Year: | 1989 |
| Periodical: | International Journal of African Historical Studies |
| Volume: | 22 |
| Issue: | 4 |
| Pages: | 601-636 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | English-speaking Africa West Africa Sierra Leone Great Britain |
| Subjects: | racism colonialism health personnel biographies (form) Health and Nutrition History and Exploration Ethnic and Race Relations |
| About person: | M.C.F. Easmon |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/219057 |
| Abstract: | Pseudoscientific racism permeated the colonial service in West Africa near the end of the nineteenth century. Africans in all branches of the colonial service, many of whom had been educated in the same schools as their European counterparts, found their careers blocked in the 1890s. The Easmon episode is used here to illustrate this development in the Colonial Medical Service. As the chief medical officer in the Gold Coast (Ghana), Dr. John Farrell Easmon, born of a Nova Scotian settler family in Freetown, Sierra Leone, was the highest-ranking African in the colonial service from 1893 to 1896. His dismissal from high office in 1897 serves as the most appropriate paradigm for analysis of the changing status of the African medical community in the Gold Coast. The Easmon episode anticipated the gradual loss of prominence of African medical practitioners in the colonial service of Anglophone West Africa. Many West Africans' interest in medicine declined by 1900, and they began to study law instead. The Easmon episode was the major catalyst in this professional transformation with the triumph of pseudoscientific racism and colonial rule. Notes, ref. |
