Page 11 - A Widening Idea of Health and Health Research - The South African Medical Research Council from Creation to COVID

A Widening Idea of Health: The SAMRC from Creation to Covid

institution, the Institute of Family and Community Health, in Durban in the 1940s.
To this piecemeal emergence of medical research in South Africa, World War II
(1939–45) gave significant impetus because it drove home the potential of modern
medical research to address disease effectively and thereby advance the socio-political
project of the creation of a white welfare state whose efficient operation would be
informed by, inter alia, the latest ideas in Western science, medicine and technology.
Summing up this ethos, that institutional embodiment of this vision, the new
Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), averred on its foundation in
1945 that science had to play a key role in how the state should develop new ‘frontiers
of the mind’ in South Africa. In this, the health of the population as an indicator of
2
modernity would be central. As the chair of the National Health Services Commission
of Inquiry (1942–4), Dr Henry Gluckman, argued, ‘The State must protect health as
its most important property.’ To ensure this, ‘Statesmanship should not lag behind
scientific discovery.’ Recognizing this in a South Africa in which the life expectancy
3
at birth of even the favoured white population was just 42.46 years, within a year
4
the CSIR appointed a committee for medical research to advise it on applications
for medical research funding from leading local scholars in this field, around whom
the research units were to be built. By 1950 seven such medical research units were
receiving CSIR funding of this type, two each at the universities of Cape Town and the
Witwatersrand and at the state’s Department of Public Health and one at the South
African Institute for Medical Research.
However, the different priorities and orientations of the four institutions housing
these units made it very difficult to develop a co-ordinated programme of medical
research for the country. The Department of Public Health claimed that it should take
responsibility for this, but this the CSIR disputed. They even disagreed over what
constituted ‘research’, the CSIR holding that surveys undertaken by Public Health
were not ‘proper’ scientific research as it understood the term. A senior medical
adviser at the CSIR lamented that such confusion ‘bedevilled the parts played by [the
two] statutory authorities concerned with medical research … [causing] bottlenecks
and barriers’ between them. These ‘have done more than anything … to hold up the
proper development of medical research in this country’.
5
Stung by criticism in Parliament about the lack of a coherent direction in South
Africa’s medical research and particularly its failure to establish how best to curb the
incidence of bilharzia among white farmers in the Transvaal and Natal provinces, in
1957 the CSIR eventually decided to heed the advice of a government commission of
inquiry into the co-ordination of medical research and to put its committee on medical
research onto a firmer institutional footing. It reconstituted it as the Committee for

4