Abstract Summary
During the first half of the twentieth-century, neurosurgeons in the US linked differential experiences of brain/intracranial tumors such as meningiomas, gliomas, lymphomas, pituitary adenomas, and craniopharyngiomas to biological difference. In 1937, for instance, Harvey Cushing wrote that “brain tumors of any kind were rare in negroes.” Having seen only four meningiomas out of some two thousand brain tumors in his practice, Cushing concluded that negroes were exempt from meningiomas because their skulls were denser and thicker than those of whites. But differential incidence of brain tumors was not only racialized, but also gendered and geneticized; the latter especially in the 1970s by pathologists like Joseph Kovi and Kenneth Earle. However, by the last quarter of the century, a more egalitarian style of thinking on intracranial neoplasms would evolve in the US, which held that these neoplasms also affected negroes. My paper argues that the evolution of this new knowledge was not an exclusively US production, but drew extensively on the knowledge produced on intracranial neoplasms by African neurosurgeons, neurologists, and pathologists like Latunde Odeku and Adelola Adeloye during the period 1960s-1980s. It examines the why and how of the production and circulation of this style of thinking from Africa to the US. Thus, by locating the evolution of this new style of thinking not in the United States, but in Africa, and paying attention to the contributions of non-Western actors to western knowledge production, my paper, contributes and extends the new scholarship on global perspectives on science.
