ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship of medicine and imperialism on the South African frontier, focusing on three distinct moments widely separated in time. First the shaping of an imperial vision in late eighteenth-century discourses of the afflicted continent. Second the advent of the mid-nineteenth-century healing mission. Third the founding of the colonial state in the early twentieth century. The chapter suggests that the development of British colonialism in Africa, as a cultural enterprise, was inseparable from the rise of biomedicine as science. The frontiers of "civilization" were the margins of a European sense of health as social and bodily order, and the first sustained probe into the ailing heart of Africa was a "mission to the suffering." With the ascendance of comparative anatomy and biology, the reduction of African society and culture to such organic bases took on more authority.
