Gender, race and class at work: enlisting African health labour into the Gold Coast Medical Service, 1860–1957
Bibliographic record
Abstract
From the mid-nineteenth century, the people of the Gold Coast formed an essential component of the missionary and early colonial medical services (CMS). The labour of the people was mainly confined to the category of medical auxiliaries. Enlisting these African auxiliaries into the medical service took place within gendered, racial and class boundaries. Yet, the historiography of the Gold Coast does not overtly address the interplay of gender, race and class in connection with the work of African health auxiliaries. This article examines the intersection of race, gender and class in the employment and training of African health labour in the Gold Coast. It argues that European and African gendered ideologies, racial discrimination and class difference influenced the recruitment of Africans into early colonial and missionary medical services. This article is largely based on qualitative research and critical reading and re-reading of textual records. The records include colonial medical reports obtained from the digital archives of the Wellcome Library in London, Manhyia Archives of Ghana, and Public Records and Archives Administration Department in Kumase of Ghana. Books and dissertations were critically re-examined for fragmented details about these auxiliary workers. This article reveals that men dominated the categories of African health labour, that is doctors, orderlies, dispensers, nurses and midwives until the 1940s when more women began to enter the CMS. The relationship between African and European medical staff, and colonial administrators within the Gold Coast Medical Department from the 1890s shows the existence of racial discrimination largely based on physical appearance and intellectualism. Recruiting Africans into the CMS was necessary to augment insufficient European staffing across many occupations, but not to the same rank and class. This research identifies the pathways into the formalised health professions in Ghana within the context of colonial and missionary medicine.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".