The Riddle of Malnutrition : The Long Arc of Biomedical and Public Health Interventions in Uganda

Authors

Jennifer Tappan

Files

Series

Perspectives on Global Health

Description

More than ten million children suffer from severe acute malnutrition globally each year. In Uganda, longstanding efforts to understand, treat, and then prevent the condition initially served to medicalize it, in the eyes of both biomedical personnel and Ugandans who brought their children to the hospital for treatment and care. Medicalization meant malnutrition came to be seen as a disease—as a medical emergency—not a preventable condition, further compromising nutritional health in Uganda.

Rather than rely on a foreign-led model, physicians in Uganda responded to this failure by developing a novel public health program known as Mwanamugimu. The new approach prioritized local expertise and empowering Ugandan women, blending biomedical knowledge with African sensibilities and cultural competencies.

In The Riddle of Malnutrition, Jennifer Tappan examines how over the course of half a century Mwanamugimu tackled the most fatal form of childhood malnutrition—kwashiorkor—and promoted nutritional health in the midst of postcolonial violence, political upheaval, and neoliberal resource constraints. She draws on a diverse array of sources to illuminate the interplay between colonialism, the production of scientific knowledge, and the delivery of health services in contemporary Africa.

Copyright Statement

The Riddle of Malnutrition © 2017 by Ohio University Press is licensed under Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Language

eng

ISBN

9780821445914

Publication Date

6-19-2017

Publisher

Ohio University Press

City

Athens

Keywords

The Riddle of Malnutrition, Jennifer Tappan, Uganda, malnutrition, kwashiorkor, public health, biomedicalization, child health, nutrition, African medicine, postcolonial Africa, global health, medical anthropology, women’s empowerment, Mwanamugimu program, local expertise, colonialism, health policy, medical history, development, global health systems

Disciplines

African History | African Studies | Community Health and Preventive Medicine | Health Policy | Public Health

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Tappan, Jennifer, "The Riddle of Malnutrition : The Long Arc of Biomedical and Public Health Interventions in Uganda" (2017). Ohio University Press Open Access Books. 100.
https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/oupress/100