Medicine
Orthodox medicine with its synthetic pill was not a thing as the people when ill visited the community healer – he could be a traditional healer or a healer and a mystic or diviner.
The healers possessed an extensive knowledge of herbs, trees, roots and their medicinal purposes. There was relatively little side effect and cost was easy on the pocket. In the absence of currency, good old barter sufficed. It wasn’t surprising then that even after independence, people still preferred to access healthcare at their local healer’s place.
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Caesarean section is credited to Africans. It came to European attention in 1897 when Robert Felkin recorded it in ‘The Development of Scientific Medicine in the African Kingdom of Bunyoro Kitara (Western Uganda). “Banana wine was used as an anaesthetic, reeds were used to perform episiotomies and bleeding was stopped by cauterising with hot irons. The patient was stitched up with iron spikes (removed after six days, how long does it take to remove stiches?), root paste applied and bark used to bandage the wound.” The practitioners had no need for scalpels, ether and overpriced beds.
Even with childbirth, skilled and trusted local women delivered the babies of the community women. The skill often passed down through generations. And while Western style industrialization hadn’t advanced on the continent, Africans who found themselves across the Atlantic because of the slave trade still possessed the creative and inventional strand in them so went ahead to invent new equipment, tools and devices to make life better.
Cotton Mather who introduced small-pox inoculation in the West is said to have learnt it from an enslaved, named Onesimus.
