"They Could Make Their Victims Dull": Genders and Genres, Fantasies and Cures in Colonial Southern Uganda

THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT MEDICAL HISTORY and historical methodology. It describes the encounter between Western biomedicine and the local peoples of southern Uganda.' It argues that oral accounts of African rumors that white people captured Africans and took their blood can be read alongside medical missionary writings about triumphant drugs and vanquished superstitions to illuminate the context in which Western biomedicine was practiced. This essay is not about the clash of beliefs or of technologies; it is about what technologies were believed to be and about how much power was invested in their application. It is about cures that were rubbed on the skin or inhaled; it is about needles and scalpels that penetrated the skin and invaded the body. The two sets of sources I use overlap only to a degree. The missionaries recorded their arguments with and treatments of Africans in monthly fund-raising magazines published from 1899 to about 1935. The Church Missionary Society's Mercy and Truth (after 1922, The Mission Hospital) was published in England; it contained authored vignettes that were not always less fantastic than the oral source material. Nevertheless, they provide a chronological record of colonial medicine unlike any other: missionary medicine was the most prevalent form of rural health care in Uganda until the 1950s, and it represented itself in stark contrast to African medicine for at least as long. Moreover, in Uganda, missionary