HEALTH AND MEDICINE — GENERAL 47 I 



recognition that private practice among native as well as non- 

 native races will continue to increase. 



The health work o^ commercial and mining companies deserves special 

 mention. Mining companies employ considerable medical per- 

 sonnel, maintain their own hospitals and dispensaries, and thus 

 act as centres for the dissemination of medical knowledge among 

 their employees. As an agency for native welfare perhaps the 

 Belgian organizations of this kind are better examples than some 

 of the British [see below). 



Propaganda organizations are beginning to play an important 

 part in the improvement of public health. The cinematograph is a 

 specially valuable instrument of propaganda and has sometimes 

 been used as such by government departments in both East and 

 West Africa. In Nigeria, for instance, a lorry equipped to show 

 films was obtained for health propaganda through a grant from 

 the Colonial Development Fund. In 1933 the Department of 

 Social and Industrial Research of the International Missionary 

 Council considered the possibility of research into films suitable 

 for Africans. In 1935 the Bantu Educational Cinema Experiment 

 was set on foot, aided by a grant from the Carnegie Corporation 

 of New York and with the co-operation of the British Colonial 

 Office, the East African Governments, the British Film Institute, 

 and the International Institute of African Languages and Cul- 

 tures. A report on the experiment was published in 1937 (Notcutt 

 and Latham 1937) and contains proposals for future policy.^ 



For the purposes of the following pages, which sketch the medi- 

 cal and health organizations in the individual territories, data con- 

 cerning staff, beds available in hospitals, numbers of patients 

 treated and so on, have either been obtained directly from the 

 authorities concerned or extracted from recent publications. Since 

 these data are not all compiled on the same basis in the different 

 territories, it would be misleading to show them in tabular form 

 (except in the case of the Union of South Africa), and they are 

 therefore included in the text in small type. 



Union of South Africa 

 Medical and health work in the Union is under the general con- 



^ See A Survey of Africa, Chapter xvi. 



