Events

Past Event

A Medical Disaster and its Aftermaths: The Quest for Sleeping Sickness Eradication in Colonial Africa

October 20, 2020
2:15 PM - 3:30 PM
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Online

Event Description

Guillaume Lachenal will present an episode of late-colonial public health, the so-called "Lomidinization" campaigns to eradicate sleeping sickness. After the Second World War, these campaigns were launched with great enthusiasm, and led to the administration of preventive Lomidine injections to more than 10 millions African colonial subjects. However, they were abandoned in the late 1950s after the discovery of their erratic side-effects and a series of fatal accidents. Retracing the rise and fall of that "wonder drug", and the sequence of hubris, denial and violence that accompany it, Guillaume Lachenanl examines how colonial medicine left strong marks in African bodies, ecologies and memories – especially in the form of iatrogenic epidemics including HIV and the Hepatitis C virus.

Event Speakers

  • Guillaume Lachenal, Associate Professor in History of Science at the Université Paris Diderot
  • Thomas Dodman, Assistant Professor of French at Columbia University

Event Information

Free and open to the public; registration is required. For more information, please visit the event webpage

Hosted by Maison Française and sponsored by: