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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Dr. John Farrell Easmon: Medical Professionalism and Colonial Racism in the Gold Coast, 1856-1900
Author:Patton (jr), AdellISNI
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.
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