Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

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Water Marginalised?

October 26, 2021

Water can produce both favourable and unfavourable health outcomes. As this has been well known since the mid-nineteenth century, the following question arises: why did many polities across the world struggle to commit to improving water supplies and sanitation in the twentieth century? My research explores how the marginalisation of water within the fragmentary structures of imperial and international policy making shaped commitment (or lack thereof) to developing water supplies and sanitation facilities in twentieth-century Africa. By exploring how administrators and scientists did or did not conceptualise water as a key public health issue—and how this framing shaped imperial, colonial, national, and international health policy—we can better understand water's marginalisation in twentieth century health discourses. Researching at the Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC), I sought to better understand the role of Rockefeller Foundation, Near East Foundation, and Ford Foundation officials and associates in conceptualising the relationship between water and health, and between water and development, particularly in relation to the Sudan and Uganda. This report will focus primarily on the work of Rockefeller Foundation officials and associate researchers between c. 1925 and 1940. It also draws from papers held by officials and associate researchers, which were written for, or on behalf of, the League of Nations Health Organisation or the British Colonial Office.

Ford Foundation; Interwar Years; Nelson C. Davis Papers; Public Health; Rockefeller Foundation

Yellow Fever in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan

January 1, 1995

No one had any idea that yellow fever occurred in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan until 1933, when its previous biological existence was discovered as part of an Africa-wide immunity survey conducted by the International Health Division (IHD) of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF). The IHD immunity test results baffled scientists and laymen alike: while the tests revealed pockets of high immunity to yellow fever in southern Sudan, the disease was clinically unknown in that area, indeed in all of East Africa, and no doctor could recall ever having seen a case. The discovery caused widespread consternation in the international political community, which feared that newly developing commercial air travel would spread the disease from East Africa to the virgin soil of Asia. For IHD it was an exciting, if medically puzzling, find. The Britishrun Sudan government was less enthused: only just climbing out of the Depression, it was compelled to assume the costs of compliance with international regulations designed to contain the spread of a disease which its doctors claimed did not exist in Sudan.

Public Health; Rockefeller Foundation

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