Health in the United Kingdom dependencies.
- Great Britain. Central Office of Information. Reference Division
- Date:
- 1956
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Health in the United Kingdom dependencies. Source: Wellcome Collection.
27/44 page 23
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Health in the United Kingdom dependencies. Source: Wellcome Collection.
![Medicine. These schools are of great importance as centres both of research and training. The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine maintained a laboratory at Freetown in Sierra Leone until it was closed in 1941; the laboratory has now been acquired by the Sierra Leone Government to serve as a medical research centre for West Africa. Another example of the way United Kingdom teaching institutions are helping medical work in the dependencies is the recent agreement by the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, the University of Durham and the Royal Technical College, Glasgow, to adapt the syllabuses of their post-graduate courses in Public Health to meet the needs of the Colonial territories. An experimental scheme, establishing a panel of consultants to the Colonial Medical Service, was launched in 1948 with the assistance of a grant of £30,000 from the Nuffield Foundation. It ran for six years and was confined to the African territories. The consultants selected to make visits to these territories represented the more important branches of medicine, surgery, radiology, and gynaecology, and the primary object of the scheme was to keep medical officers in the field abreast of developments in medical ahd other research in the United Kingdom. Other aims were to provide a stimulus to official and unofficial Colonial medical staffs, particularly those working in isolated posts, and to establish a body of expert opinion in the United Kingdom well informed about conditions and problems in the dependencies. The scheme proved most valuable and provision is being made for its continuance. The cost of future visits to African territories will be met by the African Governments themselves, and it is the intention that the cost of visits to non-African territories will be met from United Kingdom Colonial Development and Welfare funds for an initial period of three years. | COLONIAL MEDICAL DEPARTMENTS The various medical services, which had previously been separate services attached to the separate territories, were unified in 1934 when the Colonial Medical Service (now the Oversea Medical Service) was established. Sir Charles Jeffries (now a Deputy Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office), writing in 1938, summed up the development of Colonial medical departments. ‘Until comparatively recent times’, Sir Charles writes, ‘the function of the medical services in the Colonies was primarily that of “garrison” services which existed mainly for the purpose of looking after the health of Government officials. But during the last thirty or forty years the Medical departments have developed into highly organized State Public Health Services devoted to the prevention and cure of disease and the preservation of health amongst the general population of the Colonies. It must be remembered that in these territories the Governments had, perforce, to undertake tasks which in this country [i.e. the United Kingdom] were carried out by voluntary organizations, by private enterprise, or by local and municipal authorities. In many areas of the Colonial Empire it was the Government alone which was in a position to erect and maintain hospitals and to organize public health activities. Not only this, but in all except a](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b3217245x_0027.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
