Curing Their Ills

Download or read book Curing Their Ills written by Megan Vaughan and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-06 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Curing their Ills traces the history of encounters between European medicine and African societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Vaughan's detailed examination of medical discourse of the period reveals its shifting and fragmented nature, highlights its use in the creation of the colonial subject in Africa, and explores the conflict between its pretensions to scientific neutrality and its political and cultural motivations. The book includes chapters on the history of psychiatry in Africa, on the treatment of venereal diseases, on the memoirs of European 'Jungle Doctors', and on mission medicine. In exploring the representations of disease as well as medical practice, Curing their Ills makes a fascinating and original contribution to both medical history and the social history of Africa.