ABSTRACT

This chapter examines how colonial biomedical knowledge – often coming in the shape of a repository of mortality, morbidity, disease, degeneration, and ruination – was produced and applied in this region, and simultaneously brought into circulation in metropolitan Spain for popular consumption or propaganda purposes. Medical interventions played a pivotal role in shaping the contours of European colonization of Africa: the centrality of medical projects and public health initiatives in the process of territorial expansion should not be underestimated. Health was not an end in itself, but rather the prerequisite for colonial penetration first, and colonial modernity. The extractive economic practices that characterized the island of Fernando Poo – and increasingly the continental part of the territory today comprising Equatorial Guinea – during the first decade of the twentieth century were mirrored in the realm of medicine by the newly generalized medical practice of blood tests.