“Health is Much too Important A Subject to be Left to Doctors”: African Assistant Health Workers in Natal During the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

Unlike earlier scholarship that has explored the important histories of “traditional” African and Indian healers, as well as “non-European” nurses and doctors in South Africa, this article is centrally concerned with analysing a far less researched subject. It will examine the experiences of professionally subordinate “non-European”, but particularly African, auxiliary health personnel – such as missionary medical assistants, and state employed medical aids and community health workers – who were trained and worked within the western biomedical system in South Africa.