Medicine10

“The colonial economy should make the n***arms subservient to itself, hygiene should keep them strong and increase their numbers. […] Let us stay with East Africa and assume that sleeping sickness has only claimed or will only claim 10,000 lives until our fight against it is victorious.”

Quoted by Wolfgang U. Eckart (1997): Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus Deutschland 1884-1945, S. 59. Original Source: Ludwig Külz (1911): Grundzüge der kolonialen Eingeborenenhygiene, in: Beihefte z. Arch. f. Schiffs- u.Trophyg. 15 (1911) 3, 386-475; Wesen und Ziele (1910).

Ludwig Külz (1875-1938) was a doctor and from 1902 head of the Nachtigal Hospital in Togo. The indigenous population was denied access and treatment there. He was also a government doctor in other German colonies. From 1920 onwards he trained so-called emigrants as a professor at the Hamburg Tropical Hygiene Institute. In the quote, Külz referred to the prevailing “motto”, “Black hands, white heads”, which was first postulated by Friedrich Wulffert in a lecture.

In the collective memory, German colonial medicine is often associated with “adventure”, dangerous tsetse flies or the self-sacrificing efforts of German doctors “far from home”. At the latest with the “colonial entry” of the German Empire in 1884, many (especially young) doctors took advantage of their assignment in the colonies to advance their medical careers. In this context, they developed dangerous drugs that they tested on the colonized population. This happened primarily in the sleeping sickness concentration camps and leprosy homes in Togo, Cameroon and “German East Africa”. From 1907 onwards there was to be a more “social” colonial policy, based on “humanity, justice and charity”. However, here too, the “effective exploitation of the land and people” – such as the “arms” of the colonized mentioned in the quote, i.e. the labor of the colonized – to maintain and improve the German colonial economy was the actual goal. Ludwig Külz called for a “colonial human economy” that should implement acculturation and the implementation of “colonial racial hygiene” as “sanitary pedagogy”. The task of the “tropical hygienist” is to strengthen the weakening German colonial economy by preserving “valuable” life within the colonized population (e.g. “strong men”). At the same time, it was Külz's central concern to avoid “bad” or “inferior” lives, especially in the sense of a so-called “mixed-race population”.

*Wolfgang U. Eckart (1997): Medizin und Kolonialimperialismus Deutschland 1884-1945. Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh: Paderborn.

1911