The great Catholic contribution to health care in SA

by Gunther Simmermacher · July 19, 2011

IN THE SERVICE OF HEALING: A History of Catholic Health Care in Southern Africa. Published by CATHCA, Johannesburg. 2011. 128pp

Reviewed by Gunther Simmermacher

Here is a piece of useful Catholic trivia: Johannesburgs first (and for a few decades only) hospital was run by Catholic nuns.

The sick and injured of the mining camp of Johannesburg were treated in the local jailhouse until in 1888 the first hospital was built from public funds, with a Catholic businessman, W St John Carr, as chairman of its board. Carr asked the Sisters of the Holy Family of Bordeaux, who already had teaching nuns in the area, to send some nursing staff. Soon after, Mother St Adele and three sisters arrived, and the mother superior took charge of the new Johannesburg General Hospital.

By the time the last nuns left the hospital in 1916, they were praised for having established a world-class medical and training facility.

This is just one among several fascinating stories of Catholics pioneering health care in Southern Africa, sometimes under extreme circumstances, recounted by the writers of In The Service of Healing, published by the Catholic Health Care Association of South Africa (Cathca). Clearly an immense amount of research went into this project. What emerges is an engaging witness of concrete service to the people of Southern Africa.

Often that service was heroic, because of the difficulties of the environments in which these missionaries served, or because they cared for people in the front lines of violent conflict. Many times they defied the racial discrimination that was a norm in the region long even before the policy of apartheid was imposed.

Typically, Catholic orders set up hospitals where successive white rulers did not bother to do so. By 1950, there were 73 Catholic hospitals in South Africa, South West Africa (now Namibia), Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Swaziland and Basutoland (now Lesotho). They provided not only medical services, often at nominal fees, but also trained African nurses.

As a result, for much of the 20th century, the vast majority of South Africans received health care not from the government, but from Catholic mission hospitals until the apartheid regime expropriated almost all of them in the 1970s. In many areas, the Catholic health mission continued with increasingly lay-run clinics.

As in education, the Catholic contribution to health care in South Africa (and in its neighbouring countries) has been enormous and often not fully appreciated. This book serves to correct that neglect.

In The Service of Healing is generously illustrated, thanks to the research work by Lungi Mbokazi. Some photos, such as those of the bewimpled nurses in the operating theatre of Johannesburg General Hospital in 1890 or Mariannhills Abbot Franz Pfanner in a simple horse-drawn carriage, are on their own worth the acquisition of this book.

Researcher Loek Goemans and editor Hilary Wilson have compiled a valuable overview of the history of Catholic health care in Southern Africa. The book offers kernels of many great stories which, hopefully, will be told one day in more extensive narratives.