Gender, Health, and Social Completeness: Masculinity, Medicine, and the Making of Reproductive Bodies in Yoruba, Nigeria (1900-1960)

This dissertation examines men’s reproductive health as a historically consequential domain in Yorubaland, Nigeria, challenging the assumption that reproduction in African history has been primarily a biological concern of women. Men’s reproductive capacities were centrally legible within Yoruba medical systems, where conditions such as infertility and sexual incapacity were treated as matters central to social order. Men sought resolution through Yoruba medicinal prescriptions and consultations with healers. From the early twentieth century, colonial litigation over marriage and paternity, together with print media, transformed men’s sexual and reproductive difficulties into subjects of public scrutiny. Situated at the intersection of African gender history and the history of medicine, this study argues that men’s reproductive challenges generated a crisis of masculinity with significant social consequences. Drawing on indigenous medical texts, court records, and print media sources, the dissertation demonstrates how men’s bodies functioned as criteria for assessing what I conceptualize as “completeness” in Yoruba understandings of individual and social order. By reconceptualizing reproduction as a relational and governed process, the study reveals how men’s reproductive health served as a key metric through which social completeness was evaluated, offering a new framework for understanding medicine, reproduction and masculinity in Nigerian and African history.