ABSTRACT
Conventional accounts of the history of health care in South Africa have focused on biomedicine, its development and dissemination.1 It is only the extent of contemporary health problems, first with sexually transmitted diseases, and currently with the AIDS pandemic, that is resulting in a fuller account being taken of the cultural beliefs and practices of the African population. A longer-term historical view of medicine in southern Africa provides a fascinating view of the subtle shifts in the relationship between Western and traditional medicine, in which the latter achieved only fluctuating visibility through colonial eyes. In contrast to the colonists, however, missionaries were always particularly sensitive to the presence of a pluralistic medicine in southern Africa, although they tended to see indigenous medicine as mere superstition, with ‘witch doctors’ practising magic and sorcery. It was in the rural hospitals administered by missionaries that many African nurses were trained. The work of these nurses was at the intersection of two healthcare worlds, and this chapter explores the different ways in which they may have acted as culture brokers between the ‘modern’ Western medical model of their training and the African ‘traditional’ medicine of many of their patients.
