Let me begin with a caveat: when the topic of this paper was first broached to me by Professor Vansina, I was excited but at a loss as to what exactly it meant or entailed. Not being formally trained in the history of ideas, otherwise known as intellectual history, I wrote back requesting some explanation. Even though this was kindly provided, it did very little to relieve my uneasiness, especially as I recalled H. Stuart Hughes' (1961: 7) caution about writing the history of ideas: “The commonest error of the intellectual historian is to write about things he does not really understand — things he has not ‘internalized’ and thought through for himself.”

Equally disconcerting was the futurity aspect of the topic which, in traditional African terms, would have prompted a visit to the oracle or diviner. For in times of trouble, that is, when an African is confronted with a seemingly insoluble problem, the tendency would be to seek supernatural intervention. But alas, this is America! Thus I am left to rely so.

More seriously, let me emphasize the point that the task at hand is a difficult and ambitious one, at least from a conceptual standpoint. For our purposes, therefore, the approach to the subject is from the “bottom up” instead of from “above,” in marked contrast to the conventional practice in this field. As a result, we have posed some fundamental questions, not for the purpose of producing definitive answers but to use as the framework for our discussion. Accordingly: (1) What, exactly, do we mean by the history of ideas? (2) Whose ideas should we be concerned with? (3) What are the possible sources from which our data will be drawn? (4) What is the scope and objective of this historical exercise?

When I was first asked to write this paper, I was instructed that the whole field of social history was open to my purview and that my efforts should be directed to future accomplishments and not past glories. My first impulse was to wander over to the library and try to determine in fact what social history was in order to bring some boundaries to my paper. After looking through several of the standard reference works on the social sciences and their definitions of social history, I began to feel that I was not the only person unsure of the boundaries between social/political/economic/intellectual/religious history. Furthermore the request to look only into the future and not the past left me feeling out of sorts given my historian's training. Thus, I decided instead to try to examine several of the many areas of the social history of Africa which are largely unworked or need examination in more depth.

The medical history of Africa is an area in which many fruitful and significant opportunities exist for further research. Work in this field has been done in several different countries and the results are beginning to appear in a growing number of books and articles. Yet there are still a great many important topics and geographic areas which remain to be explored. These range from local issues such as the sleeping sickness epidemic which ravaged the Zaire River basin near the turn of the century, to the regional differences of experiences with epidemic disease in early colonial Africa, especially those differences between East and West Africa (Feierman, 1985).