ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Bureaucracy of Bias: Epidemiology and William Fergusson’s Statistical Re-Interpretation of Government Instructions in Sierra Leone

• In Event: Problematising Colonial Instructions: The Global Context of Scientific and Medical Information, 1650-1850

English Abstract

In 1825 the British government’s Sierra Leone Commission of Inquiry sent the black surgeon William Fergusson a detailed tropical health questionnaire about the West African colonies. Like other contemporary parliamentary directives related to climate and health, Fergusson and the colony’s other medical staff saw the queries as a set of scientific instructions, a list of data-gathering categories that needed to be filled by officials. Though the formal purpose of the Commission’s questionnaire was to identify whether the tropical environment of Sierra Leone helped or hindered its financial viability as a crown colony, Fergusson realised that the questions were framed by inaccurate and potentially biased assumptions about the epidemiological relationship between climate and health for people of European and African descent. This essay explores how he used his Edinburgh University medical training and expert knowledge of the local climate to reinterpret the commissioners’ instructions in ways that enabled him to create statistics that subverted the British government’s incipient bureaucratic practice, the bias, of prioritising skin tone over behavioural and topographical factors when attempting to understand the mortality rates of colonies in tropical locations.

Author

• Matthew Eddy, Durham University