Paper short abstract:

This paper contrasts the mechanisms by which the scientific and cultural lives of disease control have been rendered in/as memory at a medical site of one-time global renown, the Leprosy Centre, Uzuakoli, Nigeria.

Paper long abstract:

The records of past scientific endeavour at the Leprosy Centre, Uzuakoli, where much of the key experimental work underpinning today's treatment regimen was carried out, have been of little interest to embattled successive medical administrators, grappling with the chaos of post Civil War and post structural adjustment public health. The constrained horizons thus constructed around medical activity, its spaces and temporalities, and its histories contrast with the echoes and resonances of song and music - relating to the life and work of former patient Ikoli Harcourt Whyte - for which the Leprosy centre is much more greatly renowned in Nigeria. Contrasting experimental practice and musical culture - paper records and shared songs - as roots of memory and commemoration, this paper interrogates the fate of science in the aftermath of promise, demonstrating a surprisingly robust cultural legacy of the experience of science and therapy, even as the records of scientific progress lie ruined.