Commonwealth Day

When the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Systems Trust brought together a group of senior journalists, politicians and foreign ambassadors to discuss the media and the marginalised the illustration of life in rural South Africa came across more vividly than was intended. Even with its fleet of chartered planes and 4X4 vehicles, the tour could not reach its destination of Mount Frere in the former Transkei.

Women are numerically dominant in virtually all health care disciplines except the medical profession. This anomaly is rooted in developments in Western medicine during the 16th and 17th centuries when knowledge of anatomy, physiology and the causes of diseases regained a scientific and theoretical base after the hiatus of the medieval period. Medical training was then established in the universities and the role of wise women and female healers was increasingly discredited and relegated to the treatment of women and those who could not afford the care of learned male physicians.