Oxford Handbook of Tropical Medicine

Аннотация

Two special challenges of working in the rural tropics A fundamental requirement of good medical practice is the ability to communicate with patients. Western doctors working in tropical developing countries may encounter barriers to understanding their patients’ complaints and medical needs that far exceed simple linguistic translation. I fi rst encountered this problem when starting work in northern Nigeria in the 1970s. Hausa was not a diffi cult language (certainly compared to Amharic, with which I had struggled in Ethiopia) and, in any case, professional interpreters were available in Ahmadu Bello University Hospital. The real problem was trying to understand what the expression of a physical symptom implied in the local culture. Luckily, an experienced anthropologist, Murray Last, was living and working with a local Muguzawa community, 2 Hausa-speaking colleagues in the University, Allan Darrah a sociologist and John Froude a physician, produced an invaluable booklet ‘Hausa Medicine for Western Doctors’ and I had long conversations with a wise old friend in the Emir’s court, Madauchi Zazzau. With this considerable help I was able to begin to understand what an ostensibly straightforward symptom, such as feeling cold, might mean and might usefully be interpreted in the process of seeking a diagnosis.