Colonial medical reformers condemned folk remedies even while admitting they 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 (#expands, via linked claim)

In all objectivity and in all humanity, it is a good thing that a technically advanced country benefits from its knowledge and the discoveries of its scientists. When the discipline considered concerns man’s health, when its very principle is to ease pain, it is clear that no negative reaction can be justified. But the colonial situation is precisely such that it drives the colonized to appraise all the colonizer’s contributions in a pejorative and absolute way. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 396 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial hygiene texts attacked folk remedies’ explanatory frame even where the remedies worked. — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 329; The colonial situation forces colonized people to reject even beneficial medicine categorically. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 396; Some colonial observers condemned imitation-Europeans and instead urged preserving native cultural roots. (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Colonial hygiene texts attacked folk remedies’ explanatory frame even where the remedies worked. #expands (0.92) — Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, 329
• The colonial situation forces colonized people to reject even beneficial medicine categorically. #complicates (0.75) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 396
• Colonized peoples reject foreign medicine as an instrument of exploitation #complicates (0.73)