Book talk: Christoph Gradmann in conversation with Johanna Conterio: “Another Magic Mountain: Kibong’oto Hospital and African Tuberculosis, 1920–2000, Ohio University Press 2025 (Perspectives on Global Health)."
You can join us in person or on ZOOM.
Abstract
The topic
The book is a history of a big Tanzanian tuberculosis hospital and of African clinical science from colonial to post-colonial days. Existing since 1926 in Northern Tanzania, Kibong’oto Hospital has been the only specialized hospital for tuberculosis in East Africa for a long time, at times attracting patients from all over the region. After Tanganyika’s independence, it became the national tuberculosis hospital and for decades had a dominant position in Tanzania. Its history teaches us about the development of clinical medicine from colonial to postcolonial days and more generally how medical science was practiced in a low resource setting, what trajectories it followed, how these compare to the histories of clinical science in the North and to trajectories of tuberculosis control in international health.
The material
During fieldwork in northern Tanzania, an archive was created at Kibong’oto hospital, which became supplemented by material from elsewhere: the National Archive in Dar es Salaam, the Public Records Office in London, the archives of the WHO in Geneva, private collections and interviews. The Kibong’oto Hospital Archive became central for the book. Its core is the hospital’s extensive casebook library, previously not used in historical work. This means ten thousands of patients’ biographies from all over East Africa, centering in the Kilimanjaro region. Salvaged from termites (quite literally) and covering a period from the 1920s to the 1990s, it can serve as a rich basis to write a history of clinical science in a low-resource setting.
The argument
The book answers critically to several sets of historiographies: For Tanzanian history, it expands what we know about the country’s health history that has so far been dominated by histories of subjects like malaria, malnutrition, sleeping sickness and HIV. It discusses the development of health systems and disease control strategies from colonial to postcolonial days. It addresses question of local agency by patients, personnel, and the people of the Kilimanjaro region in which it is situated. In the larger picture, the book addresses the history of tuberculosis in sub-Saharan Africa, to which it adds a longue durée perspective on clinical science of treatment and control. Finally, it fills a gap in the histories of colonial and postcolonial medicine that is usually preoccupied with stories of elite science based on archives in London, Paris, Geneva or the like.
Bio:
Christoph Gradmann
Christoph Gradmann is professor of the history of medicine at the University of Oslo, Department of Community Medicine and Global Health. His research interests range from the intellectual history of interwar Germany, through 19th century medical bacteriology, medicine and war, 20th drug development, antibiotics resistances to the history of tuberculosis in global health, East Africa in particular. Such interests have resulted in a considerable oeuvre with several monographs, numerous editions, guest editorships and many papers. For a full CV see here.
Johanna Conterio
Johanna Conterio is Associate Professor of Environmental History in the Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History at the University of Oslo in Norway. Her research focuses on the environmental, medical, and urban history of the Soviet Union, with a particular focus on areas where these histories intersect. Her first book, Therapeutic Natures: Environment and Health in the Soviet Sanatorium, currently in production at Cornell University Press, examines the history of the Soviet sanatorium. It argues that the rise of bacteriology in the Soviet Union did not lead to a paradigm shift away from the environmental dimensions of disease in Soviet medicine, as occurred in other contexts within scientific medicine, particularly after the discovery of antibiotics. She has also published on urban green space, territoriality, the history of nutrition, and the Soviet subtropics.