Page 1 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

reated by the South African state in 1969 as the country’s premier institution
Cto conduct medical research, the South African Medical Research Council
has met this objective while at the same time always seeking to keep on the right
side of its primary fund-provider, the government of the day. Thus, initially, during
the period of high apartheid, it paid particular attention to the health of whites by
giving high priority to diseases like heart disease and porphyria. However, even
before the formal end of apartheid in 1994, it had gradually begun to expand the
focus of its research to encompass key issues affecting the bulk of the population
too, like malaria, malnutrition and violence, widening its idea of health as it did so.

This richly illustrated history of the MRC tracks this accelerating change, placing
it in its wider medical, scientific, political and socio-economic healthscape, not
least its ups and downs and steps and mis-steps during the eras of apartheid,
transition to democracy, post-apartheid, and the pandemics of HIV/AIDS, Covid-19
and TB. The book seeks to give both credit and criticism where they are due in
the MRC’s 55-year history of medico-scientific innovation and achievement, cul-
de-sacs and breakthroughs. A WIDENING IDEA OF HEALTH AND HEALTH RESEARCH HOWARD PHILLIPS

Howard Phillips is an emeritus professor of history at
the University of Cape Town where he pioneered the
teaching of the social history of disease and medicine
to both humanities and health science students in the
1990s. He is the author or co-author of, inter alia, Black A WIDENING IDEA
October: The Impact of the Spanish Flu Epidemic of
1918 on South Africa (1984), The Spanish Flu Pandemic
of 1918–19: New Perspectives (2003), The Cape Doctor OF HEALTH AND HEALTH RESEARCH
in the Nineteenth Century: A Social History (2004), At
the Heart of Healing: Groote Schuur Hospital 1938– THE SOUTH AFRICAN MEDICAL RESEARCH COUNCIL
2008 (2008), Plague, Pox and Pandemics: A Pocket
History of Epidemics in South Africa (2012), and In a FROM CREATION TO COVID
Time of Plague: Memories of the Spanish Flu Epidemic
of 1918 in South Africa (2018).

HOWARD PHILLIPS
ISBN 978-1-0672352-1-5

9 781067 235215