In this book, Rebekah Lee offers a critical introduction to the diverse history of health, healing and illness in sub-Saharan Africa from the 1800s to the present day. Its focus is not simply on disease but rather on how illness and health were understood and managed: by healthcare providers, African patients, their families and communities. Through a sustained interdisciplinary approach, Lee brings to the foreground a cast of actors, institutions and ideas that both profoundly and intimately shaped African health experiences and outcomes. This book guides the reader through a wide range of historical source material, and highlights the theoretical and methodological innovations which have enriched this scholarship. Part One delivers a concise historical overview of African health and illness from the long 'pre-colonial' past through the colonial period and into the present day, providing an understanding of broad patterns – of major disease challenges, experiences of illness, and local and global health interventions – and their persistence or transformation across time. Part Two adopts a 'case study' approach, focusing on specific health challenges in Africa – HIV/AIDS, mental illness, tropical disease and occupational disease – and their unfolding across time and space. Health, Healing and Illness in African History is the first wide-ranging survey of this key topic in African history and the history of health and medicine, and the ideal introduction for students.

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.

Kananoja demonstrates how medical interaction in early modern Atlantic Africa was characterised by continuous knowledge exchange between Africans and Europeans.

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.

These essays are an account of disease, health and healing practices on the African continent. The contributors all emphasize the social conditions linked to ill health and the development of local healing traditions, from Morocco to South Africa and from the precolonial era to the present.

Recent political, social, and economic changes in Africa have provoked radical shifts in the landscape of health and healthcare. Medicine, Mobility, and Power in Global Africa captures the multiple dynamics of a globalized world and its impact on medicine, health, and the delivery of healthcare in Africa—and beyond. Essays by an international group of contributors take on intractable problems such as HIV/AIDS, malaria, and insufficient access to healthcare, drugs, resources, hospitals, and technologies. The movements of people and resources described here expose the growing challenges of poverty and public health, but they also show how new opportunities have been created for transforming healthcare and promoting care and healing.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • The first full history of Black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read this masterful book. "[Washington] has unearthed a shocking amount of information and shaped it into a riveting, carefully documented book." —New York Times From the era of slavery to the present day, starting with the earliest encounters between Black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, Medical Apartheid details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how Blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of Blacks. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused Black Americans to view researchers—and indeed the whole medical establishment—with such deep distrust.