The Legacies of Belgian Tropical Medicine

Chapter 10 reviews the history of colonial medicine in the Belgian Congo. In this huge colony, Belgium established arguably the best healthcare system in tropical Africa, with more than 2,500 institutions of all kinds. As in the French colonies, there were large-scale disease control interventions using injectable drugs. A network of public health laboratories, including those in Léopoldville and Stanleyville, are ruled out as being instrumental in the early propagation of HIV. The brilliant career of Lucien Van Hoof, the colony’s chief medical officer for twelve years who also did cutting-edge research on the control of sleeping sickness, is highlighted. The rather debatable medical practices in Léopoldville’s STD clinics are examined; ‘free women’ were forced to undergo a long series of intravenous injections if they were thought, often wrongly, to have had syphilis previously. An outbreak among these women of ‘inoculation hepatitis’ was recognised in the early 1950s. An analysis of changes in the incidence of tuberculosis in various parts of the Belgian Congo in the 1950s suggests that HIV was already driving this increasing incidence in Léopoldville. A recent study identified several routes for the iatrogenic transmission of blood-borne viruses during the colonial and early post-colonial era.