Colonial hygiene texts attacked folk remedies’ explanatory frame even where the remedies worked.

Evidence

The method of these books was not simply to discredit the local practitioners of healing among the poor – though all of them were roundly condemned as ‘impostors’, ‘charlatans’, and ‘public robbers’ – but to impose an alternative idiom of explanation and an alternative medical practice. The author admitted, in fact, that many of the remedies of folk medicine were successful, but explained that they succeeded ‘not from any therapeutic peculiarities in them, but from the play of the imagination and nervous volitional influence, which according to biologists in most recent times, has a very dangerous action upon the constitution’. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 329

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The key insight — that replacing an explanatory idiom matters more than the efficacy of the practice itself — is the engine of all epistemic colonization, worth sitting with.