Panel 14: Hospitals, Health and Development in Independent Africa

In a recent publication Mark Harrison claims that in order to understand "how Western medicine came to be the dominant form of medicine around the world [...] we must examine far more closely the institution which has, more than any other, come to symbolise Western medicine - the modern hospital."

This panel ventures further into a new historiographical field: It seeks to understand how such a ‚global medicine‘ developed in independent Africa, both by the introduction of new hospitals and by the extension of health services beyond the hospital. It looks specifically at activities transcending the inside, medical world of the hospital and introducing the hospital into the sphere of Development.

The contributions to this panel seek to understand how new medical dispensations propagated crossing the hospital walls in order to foster both health and development of the population under the developmentalist regimes in Africa: The panel looks at what situations nourished the coming into being of new concepts of healthcare as a development activity; how this interrelated with processes of professionalization in the hospitals; and how this produced new health professions to be deployed in community oriented „outreach activities“ of hospitals. Furthermore: how did hospital based actors and institutions answer and adapt to the challenges to hospital centred health service delivery and how have hospital services been adopted into broader health system approaches; how did these changes affect the character of both cure and care. Finally the panel raises the issue whether, then, the de-centering of the hospital was crucial for the formation of a ‚modern medicine‘ with a distinctively different shape: a medicine in developing countries.