Race, science and medicine, 1700–1960

power. The strength of this book lies in the care with which the definition of colonial medicine is made to interact with the shifting ideologies underpinning the British presence in the Sudan. Colonial encounters are described in a language of accommodated power always modified by the responses and/or collusion of the colonized. In the case of the sleeping sickness camps, authority relied upon the co-operation of the population within and without the camp. Attempts to understand and deal with yellow fever extended the colonial presence, but showed how when it needed to be at its strongest it was, in fact, at its weakest. Bell interprets the governance of the Sudan, via the Foreign Office not the Colonial Office, and the effects of the changing status of Egypt as significant. In the main, as is her intention, the ideologies discussed are those of the colonizers, but there is an appropriate interweaving and questioning of the views of the colonized such as indigenous administrators and Sudanese practitioners of western medicine at various levels in the medical hierarchy. Moreover, Bell provides insights into the opinions of different groups of nonEuropeans as they function amidst the demands of colonial rule and the imposition of external values. In the case of the labourers working on the Gezira cotton fields, perceptions of "Westerners" (immigrants from West Africa) shaped by a medical discourse, are articulated among the local Sudanese. Similarly the appropriateness or otherwise of indigenous midwives is an object of discussion and action among the educated elite in urban centres. Those fearful of the ghost of the imperial apologist might be slightly perturbed by the greater focus on European perceptions. I would argue she has tried and succeeded in illustrating subtlety and diversity in the colonial experience.