Page 35 - 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

racial groups to be published to accompany an article comparing mortality rates in the
country by race. The author was told that his article contained too many references
to publications by the South African Institute of Race Relations and that the intended
medical readership of the article in the South African Medical Journal would be put off
by a text that was perceived as excessively political. As taken aback at such censorship
as the authors of the asbestos paper had been the year before, he concluded that ‘the
MRC was governed by conservative forces concerned to avoid anything that might be
seen as too critical of the status quo’. 45
Tellingly, for Brink the significance of the research into the effects of exposure to
asbestos lay not in its possible connection to cancer, but in what light it might shed
on racially different susceptibility to asbestosis. ‘Differences in the immunological
system appear to be of major importance in the definition of susceptible groups’, he
postulated.
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In doing so, he was articulating a dominant idea then held by a wide swathe of
medical researchers in South Africa across the ideological spectrum that, as he himself
put it, they had before them ‘unique opportunities to study widely differing disease
patterns in our different cultural and ethnic groups and in this way learn a great deal
more about the aetiology of disease’. Such a belief or working hypothesis underlay
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much of the research done within one MRC research entity after another until at
least the early 1990s, whether they were internal units directly under the MRC itself
or external units and groups funded by the MRC but attached to a university or the
SAIMR. From, for example, the prevalence of diabetes or cardiovascular disease to the
occurrence of knock-knees, stunting and hypertension, the lens of race was regularly
utilized as a primary tool of analysis and explanation. Echoing Brink, the director of
the MRC–Wits Dental Research Unit, Professor Peter Cleaton-Jones, observed that
‘In South Africa with her many population groups, there are unique opportunities
for epidemiological studies of disease patterns’, while the MRC–UCT Clinical
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Psychiatry Research Unit’s director, Professor Lynn Gillis, reported that its research
was showing ‘that there is a definite difference in psychiatric symptoms in different
racial groups, with Blacks and Coloureds tending to present more often with acute
psychotic episodes’. In like vein, he concluded that, depending on race, culture and
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language, ‘there appear to be certain differences in the type of life stress that Blacks
and Whites are subjected to’. Outdoing all the other research units in its fixation on
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race as key to explaining physiological and pathological differences was the MRC–
SAIMR Human Biochemistry Research Unit. The list of conditions it investigated,
by analysing them within a comparative racial framework, stretched from appendicitis
to prostate cancer, from lactose intolerance and iron deficiency to faeces composition

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