Curing Their Ills

Curing Their Ills
Author :
Publisher : Stanford University Press
Total Pages : 244
Release :
ISBN-10 : 0804719713
ISBN-13 : 9780804719711
Rating : 4/5 (13 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Curing Their Ills by : Megan Vaughan

Download or read book Curing Their Ills written by Megan Vaughan and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.


Curing Their Ills Related Books

Curing Their Ills
Language: en
Pages: 244
Authors: Megan Vaughan
Categories: Medical
Type: BOOK - Published: 1991 - Publisher: Stanford University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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
Curing Their Ills
Language: en
Pages: 220
Authors: Megan Vaughan
Categories: History
Type: BOOK - Published: 2013-06-06 - Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Curing their Ills traces the history of encounters between Europeanmedicine and African societies in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies. Vaughan's detailed e
Creating the Creole Island
Language: en
Pages: 366
Authors: Megan Vaughan
Categories: Foreign Language Study
Type: BOOK - Published: 2005-02 - Publisher: Duke University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The island of Mauritius lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 550 miles east of Madagascar. Uninhabited until the arrival of colonists in the late sixte
Curing Medicare
Language: en
Pages: 263
Authors: Andy Lazris
Categories: Medical
Type: BOOK - Published: 2016-05-19 - Publisher: Cornell University Press

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Andy Lazris, MD, is a practicing primary care physician who experiences the effects of Medicare policy on a daily basis. As a result, he believes that the way w
A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa
Language: en
Pages: 483
Authors: Roy Richard Grinker
Categories: Social Science
Type: BOOK - Published: 2019-02-06 - Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and di