The colonized accepts colonial medicine but must simultaneously honor traditional healing

Evidence

The colonized obscurely realizes that penicillin is more effective, but for political, psychological, social reasons, he must at the same time give traditional medicine its due. (The healer fulfills a function and therefore needs to earn a living.) Psychologically, the colonized has difficulty, even here in the presence of illness, in rejecting the habits of his group and the reactions of his culture. Accepting the medicine, even once, is admitting, to a limited extent perhaps but nonetheless ambiguously, the validity of the Western technique. It is demonstrating one’s confidence in the foreigner’s medical science. Swallowing the whole dose in one gulp is literally getting even with it. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 422

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonized peoples reject foreign medicine as an instrument of exploitation; Accepting French medicine trapped the colonized within the whole colonial system; The colonial situation forces colonized people to reject even beneficial medicine categorically. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 396