Western medicine in Africa, part II: Ethiopia, East and Southern Africa to 1900
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Before 1900, Western medicine struggled to attract patients in Africa. As part 2 of the history of European medical practice in Africa before 1900, this article describes how practitioners from Europe tried to win over patients in Ethiopia and East and Southern Africa, regions that already had pluralistic healing networks of herbal and spiritual therapies. Western medicine began at a disadvantage because it could offer little to combat the diseases of the tropics or fight epidemics sweeping the continent from Asia. However, over the course of several centuries, emissaries, missionaries, and explorers from Europe were able to bring a unique set of European healing ideas, practices, and medicines to the continent with them. African patients showed skepticism towards practices that they regarded as overly invasive, such as surgery at hospitals, but they were open to experimenting with pharmaceuticals as treatments for illnesses for which they had no cure. Western medicine did not “save” the people of Africa nor did it achieve hegemony, but by 1900, it was able to gain a footing on the Horn of Africa, on the coast of East Africa, and throughout Southern Africa.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".