Healing The African Body

Examines the practice of medicine in colonial Africa. Britons dealt with the challenges of providing health care to their civilian employees, African soldiers, and the increasing numbers of freed slaves in the general population, even while the imperialists themselves were threatened by a lack of western medicines.

This subtle and powerful ethnography examines African healing and its relationship to medical science. Stacey A. Langwick investigates the practices of healers in Tanzania who confront the most intractable illnesses in the region, including AIDS and malaria. She reveals how healers generate new therapies and shape the bodies of their patients as they address devils and parasites, anti-witchcraft medicine, and child immunization. Transcending the dualisms between tradition and science, culture and nature, belief and knowledge, Langwick tells a new story about the materiality of healing and postcolonial politics. This important work bridges postcolonial theory, science, public health, and anthropology.

Healing Traditions offers a historical perspective to the interactions between South Africa's traditional healers and biomedical practitioners. It provides an understanding that is vital for the development of medical strategies to effectively deal with South Africa's healthcare challenges.

In August 2004, South Africa officially sought to legally recognize the practice of traditional healers. Largely in response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and limited both by the number of practitioners and by patients’ access to treatment, biomedical practitioners looked toward the country’s traditional healers as important agents in the development of medical education and treatment. This collaboration has not been easy. The two medical cultures embrace different ideas about the body and the origin of illness, but they do share a history of commercial and ideological competition and different relations to state power. Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948 provides a long-overdue historical perspective to these interactions and an understanding that is vital for the development of medical strategies to effectively deal with South Africa’s healthcare challenges. Between 1820 and 1948 traditional healers in Natal, South Africa, transformed themselves from politically powerful men and women who challenged colonial rule and law into successful entrepreneurs who competed for turf and patients with white biomedical doctors and pharmacists. To understand what is “traditional” about traditional medicine, Flint argues that we must consider the cultural actors and processes not commonly associated with African therapeutics: white biomedical practitioners, Indian healers, and the implementing of white rule. Carefully crafted, well written, and powerfully argued, Flint’s analysis of the ways that indigenous medical knowledge and therapeutic practices were forged, contested, and transformed over two centuries is highly illuminating, as is her demonstration that many “traditional” practices changed over time. Her discussion of African and Indian medical encounters opens up a whole new way of thinking about the social basis of health and healing in South Africa. This important book will be core reading for classes and future scholarship on health and healing in Africa.

Working Cures explores black health under slavery showing how herbalism, conjuring, midwifery and other African American healing practices became arts of resistance in the antebellum South and invoked conflicts.

The book is a fascinating account of a surgeon "s odyssey into the spirit world of African healing. It is the story of his initiation as a sangoma and how his life has been changed and enriched by the experience. It includes photographs of the author "s training.

African-Americans are susceptible to certain medical conditions, and thus, have an average lifespan that is ten years shorter than Caucasians. Previously, these disorders, which include sickle-cell anemia, diabetes, and vitiligo, had been ignored by the medical community. Health & Healing for African-Americans is an encyclopedia of medical advice and treatment prescribed by 150 leading African-American physicians. It offers a clear description of each condition, followed by home remedies, medical treatments, and strategies that have a proven track record in managing and preventing these pressing health problems. With a foreword from former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, M.D., every page of this valuable tome begins with personal stories from people who have faced and overcome their health problems. With its hundreds of helpful health messages, Health & Healing for African-Americans is on the cutting edge of a revolution in disease prevention and self-care among African-Americans.