Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness

by Megan Vaughan

This is a lively and original book, which treats Western biomedical discourse about illness in Africa as a cultural system that constructed "the African" out of widely varying, and sometimes improbable, materials. Referring mainly to British dependencies in East and Central Africa in the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, it draws on diverse sources ranging from court records and medical journals to fund-raising posters and "jungle doctor" cartoons. Curing Their Ills brings refreshing concreteness and dynamism to the discussion of European attitudes toward their others, as it traces the shifts and variations in medical discourse on African illness. Among the topics the book covers are the differences between missionary medicine, which emphasized individual responsibility for sin and disease, and secular medicine, which tended toward an ethnic model of collective pathology; leprosy and the construction of the social role of "the leper"; and the struggle to define insanity in a context of great ignorance about what the "normal African" was like and a determination to crush indigenous beliefs about bewitchment. The underlying assumption of this discourse was that disease was produced by the disintegration and degeneration of "tribal" cultures, which was seen to be occurring in the process of individualization and modernization. This was a cultural rather than a materialist model, the argument being that Africans were made sick not by the material changes to their lives and environment, but by their cultural "maladaptation" to modern life. The "scientific" discourse about the biological inferiority of "the African," traced by one school of scientists to defects in the frontal lobe, makes painful reading today; it persisted into the 1950s.

Genres: History, Medicine, Health, Nonfiction, Africa

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

Reviews

[Brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vaughn's work is excellent in tracing the lasting impact of imperial domination on the African continent. She examines the the history European medicine and it's position in African communities in 19th and 20th centuries. Vaughan explores the creation of the colonial subject in Africa and and at the same time allows as to deconstruct the pretensions of colonial medical practitioners. I think she tackles a highly complex topic in a way that makes it easily accessible.

[Matthew Loftus · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting tour through medical practice and research (mostly in Eastern and Southern Africa) during the colonial era. The author has dug deep into various archives to find a wide variety of cases and writers exploring the African as object and occasionally subject in state and missionary discourse.

[Eric Wynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

My review: http://voices.yahoo.com/curing-their-...