The Rahima Dawood Oration - SURGERY IN THE POST COLONIAL WORLD

When, almost forty years ago, I was preparing to come to Africa, I imagined that my work here would largely consist of treating people afflicted with infections peculiar to the tropics. In my early days, secluded on the rampart of the Albertine rift, I have indeed seen the struggle between man and the multifarious species, large and small, with whom he shared the environment. I have seen lesions associated with tropical virus, bacteria, protozoa, helminths, reptiles and mammals; I have seen conditions secondary to natural selection in response to the ecology of that environment; I have seen pathology due to cultural practices, mostly of the kind that have lost touch with their original environment induced purpose; and I have seen the impact of the capricious tropical whether. But even then, in the beginning of my African career, the proportion of my work that would have deserved to be categorized as "tropical" was small. By far the greatest demand on my time was posed by surgery of the female reproductive organs...