Dr J.B. Danquah: A Man of Many Parts

“It must not be forgotten that the strain and stress of the new civilised life – it’s motor and steam transport, its machinery, its preserved foods, its rapid changes, its travel and bustle, all its constant demands upon our nervous system and energy – are incomparably greater and more exacting than what our lives used to be fifty years ago. …it should therefore be made a point in our national programme of progress to see that in accepting the civilisation of the whiteman, – its comfort and luxury – we should also take measures to live according to the health and medical precepts of a civilised life. The care of health should be greater than our desire to amass individual wealth by the methods of the white man, for without health we cannot enjoy wealth. Health without wealth is blind, and wealth without health is empty…”

— An Excerpt from J.B. Danquah’s Epistle, “To the Educated Young Man of Akim Abuakwa 1929”