Baragwanath Hospital, Soweto ― A History of Medical Care 1941-1990

Established in the early 1940s as a British military hospital and built on land purchased by Cornish immigrant John Albert Baragwanath in what is now Soweto in the late 19th century, Baragwanath Hospital would see an influx of patients from the “non-European” wing of the Johannesburg General Hospital in the “white” area of Johannesburg in the late 1940s, and would eventually become one of the University of the Witwatersrand’s largest teaching centers, bringing medical students and teachers into direct contact with apartheid in the medical sphere. In its long history, the hospital—the largest in the southern hemisphere and the third largest in the world—has been shaped by a complex set of conditions, and this account examines how this rapidly growing, underfunded but surprisingly effective institution found the niche that allowed it to exist, provide medical care to a massive patient body, and at time even to flourish in the apartheid state. The history of Bara, as it is popularly known, and of its doctors and nurses, reveals much about apartheid ideology and practice, as well as resistance to it, in the realm of healthcare. This book offers new ways of exploring the history of apartheid, providing a more nuanced account of its workings.

Simonne Horwitz is an assistant professor in the department of history at the University of Saskatchewan. She lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.