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| Title: | Racial Segregation and Medical Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Cape Town |
| Author: | Deacon, Harriet |
| Year: | 1996 |
| Periodical: | Journal of Southern African Studies |
| Volume: | 22 |
| Issue: | 2 |
| Period: | June |
| Pages: | 287-308 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic terms: | South Africa Great Britain |
| Subjects: | segregation colonization prisons hospitals History and Exploration Health and Nutrition Ethnic and Race Relations Politics and Government Urbanization and Migration |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/2637062 |
| Abstract: | This study considers the timing and the nature of the emergence of racial segregation in two colonial institutions of the 19th-century Cape (South Africa), the Breakwater Prison and the General Infirmary on Robben Island, which included a chronic sick hospital, a lunatic asylum and a leper hospital. Whereas the early 1900s are seen as a crucial decade in the development of systematic racial segregation in South African society as a whole, the Robben Island hospitals and the Breakwater prisons provide evidence of segregatory pressures from the 1860s and 1870s. In this regard, medical and scientific discourses played an important role, as they did in defining the need for urban segregation at the turn of the 20th century. Institutional segregation on grounds of race occurred earlier, in part because prisons and hospitals offered controlled environments suitable for experimentation. Racial segregation was also linked to other segregatory practices, such as those which were defined in terms of gender and social status. The precise timing for the introduction of racial segregation differed between institutions. Tensions between the universalist ethic of health care and the increasing pressures in favour of segregation were not easily resolved. By the 1890s, however, the social and scientific consensus in favour of racial segregation was overwhelming. Notes, ref., sum. |
