From Prayer to Penicillin: Mission Hospitals and the Transformation of Health Practices in Colonial Tanzania, c.1910–1950

Abstract

This article examines the contribution of German and British mission hospitals to the transformation of health practices in Tanzania between c.1910 and 1950. While scholarship on colonial medicine has largely emphasised the role of the colonial state in the development of biomedical institutions, comparatively less attention has been paid to mission hospitals as sites of medical, religious and cultural encounter. Drawing on missionary records, colonial administrative documents, archival materials and oral testimonies, the article argues that mission hospitals played an important role in introducing and expanding biomedical diagnosis, treatment and disease prevention. However, the diffusion of biomedicine did not completely supplant indigenous healing systems, which were selectively appropriated, altered or rejected by African communities according to their local understandings of disease, socioeconomic circumstances, availability and perceived healing efficacy. The transition from German to British colonial rule also illustrates both continuity and change in the association between missionary medicine and colonial health administration. Mission hospitals therefore functioned not merely as instruments of evangelisation or extensions of colonial medical authority, but as arenas in which missionary ambitions, colonial health policies and African therapeutic choices interacted. The article demonstrates that the transformation of health practices in colonial Tanzania was a negotiated process characterised by the expansion of biomedicine alongside the persistence of indigenous healing and medical pluralism.