Summary

This article examines a significant case study of nutrition-based health care in South Africa through social medicine and medical pluralism. Social medicine provided continuity between idealistic hopes of establishing a multiracial national health service during the 1940s, and its ‘revival’ after the democratic transition of 1994. It examines factors that made it possible to pursue progressive health care practice within the reactionary, apartheid period. This case study of a non-governmental organisation, the Valley Trust, draws on abundant documentation and oral histories. These facilitate a discussion of interaction of social conditions with therapeutic practice, and of the long-term evolution of medical pluralism.

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