Until the early 1930s, “Western” biomedical health care services for black communities were left to a small cadre of missionary doctors and nurses scattered throughout remote rural areas.7 From the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Christian missionaries were also at the forefront of training black health assistants, nurses and eventually doctors. Missionary doctors provided curative biomedical treatments and trained various health workers in “simple” first aid work in an attempt to halt what they saw as the harmful “witchcraft practices” of indigenous healers and to spread Christianity. Many of the Christian health “recruits” had been early converts or had been treated by the missions for personal illnesses. These early black health auxiliaries were greatly influenced by their Christian beliefs in
devotion, self-sacrifice and duty to work for their communities. As one early recruit asserted in a letter:
My duty is not to examine patients and prescribe some wonderful drug but to teach people better ways to live. It is the kind of work a Christian should do, the work Christ did while here on earth. He wandered from place to place teaching the people. Now and again He healed the
sick and raised the dead.8