Author: Vaughan, Megan.
Title: Curing Their Ills. Colonial Power and African Illness.
Description: Stanford University Press 1991. 224pp softcover 8vo. Owners signature ffep. hard crease to lower corner front wrap else light wear & VG condition. ISBN: 0804719713 Discusses Western biomedical discourse about illness in Africa. Draws on diverse sources such as court records and medical journals, fund-raising posters and 'jungle-doctor' cartoons. Most sources are from British dependencies in East & Central Africa between 1890 and 1950. Traces the shifts and variation in medical discourse on African illness. For instance: Missionary medicine emphasizing 'sin & disease'; leprosy and the social role of 'the leper'; and the struggle to define insanity in the context of ignorance about what the 'normal' African was like amidst a determination to crush indigenous beliefs. Africans were deemed made sick not by material changes to their lives, but rather by their cultural 'maladaptation' to modern life leading to 'scientific' discourse about their biological inferiority.

Keywords: medical anthropology medicine east central africa


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