The medical topography of empire: climate, health and J. A. B. Horton’s counter data strategies in British West Africa

During the nineteenth century, a notable number of African physicians studied in British medical schools and then served as military surgeons across British West Africa. Despite their importance, the views of this distinguished group about the relationship between data and public health have remained largely unexamined. Focusing on the early career of Dr James Africanus Beale Horton (1835-83), this article explores how his standpoint as a black doctor led him to problematise the way in which large gaps in West African climatological and mortality statistics implicitly contributed to erroneous assumptions about the impact of tropical illness upon African people. It accordingly treats the new evidence he gathered as a form of 'counter data' designed to highlight the plight of the black civilian population living in the colony's diverse topographical regions. Through treating Horton as a counter-data activist, the article offers insight into the larger historical relationship between colonial health and imperial information-gathering strategies, and it establishes Horton as a noteworthy West African public health statistician.