Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between data and disease in the mid-19th-century British colony of Sierra Leone through the eyes of the black physician James Africanus Beale Horton (1835–1883). A native of Sierra Leone and a distinguished graduate of two British medical schools, Horton sought to arrest the alarming ascent of racialised medical information gathering systems that framed the delivery of public health and wellness for both African and European inhabitants who lived across the 3,000 miles of West African coastline controlled by Britain. Concentrating on the historical context that enabled Horton to use his robust knowledge of medicine, environmental science and statistics to promote health equity within British West Africa and within the Global South more generally, I suggest that he was especially keen to challenge the proliferation of incomplete, inaccurate or irrelevant medical information by collecting and disseminating climatology and mortality ‘counter data’ that revealed the true causes of health and illness.