Frontiers of medicine in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan 1899–1940

quasi-mystical conviction, shared with such friends as John Byrom, that God infused all matter. Hartley, it might be said, denied the immaterial aspects of man so that he could sacralize the material. Allen suggestively hints at parallels with George Cheyne: one wishes that they had been followed up more systematically. Allen analyses Hartley with skill and brio. Historically, I felt some trepidations at his eagerness to assimilate Hartley's thinking with aspects of modern dynamic psychology and physics-Jung for instance and Michio Kaku's Hyperspace: a scientific Odyssey through the 10th dimension (1995)-yet another mucking around with Hartley for contemporary purposes. And his sympathies for Hartley's holistic mysticism sometimes run to the point of endorsement. These, however, if slightly obtrusive, do not corrupt the interpretations offered in a highly enjoyable book which will help to restore Hartley to his deserved prominence. As the author states in her opening sentence, this book is about the concept of colonial medicine, as evidenced in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Appropriately, Bell begins by defining both colonial and medicine. In her account a colony is the unit for analysis. She contrasts this with histories of imperial and tropical medicine, the result of a broader sweep. However, this historiography has clearly informed her arguments. Her definition encompasses a fluid framework to discuss ways in which the colonizers worked and the colonized responded. Medicine is an amalgam of scientific enquiry, laboratory and field research, mass treatment campaigns, education of local doctors, auxiliaries, midwives and attempts to educate segments of the population to conduct their lives in healthy ways. This is a less radical definition and is not quite as problematic as suggested. Contemporaries may have debated the relative efficacy of quininization versus anti-anopheline measures, but many acknowledged the breadth of medical intervention necessary and its effects on the promotion of health, even if this was in some instances predominantly socially mediated via attempts at public health education and ultimately unrealizable. Her subsequent discussion of the continuum of medicine and politics, illustrated by debates over the emotive subject of female circumcision, are thought-provoking. Bell takes us through a series of well-researched examples, for instance the histories of specific diseases and measures to combat them (schistosomiasis, malaria, sleeping sickness and yellow fever) and the negotiated development of various programmes, such as the Midwifery Training School in Omdurman. The result is a thematic study with some overlap in the chronology, which discusses the …