Introduction: the Cape Doctor in the nineteenth century

The Cape Doctor, named after the profession as well as the wind that sweeps the Cape Peninsula of dangerous miasmas, is a social history of medicine, seeking to place formal western medicine within its political, social and economic context. Besides Shula Marks' study of South African nurses, Divided Sisterhood, no previous work has brought such a breadth of material about South Africa's medical past under the framework of social history. This work provides clear evidence of the way in which the Cape medical profession excluded all but a few women and black practitioners, and discriminated along lines of race, class and gender in their practice, but it also moves beyond the classic revisionist tradition (documenting the emergence of a society divided along lines of race and gender) by providing examples of cultural crossover and medical pluralism.