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.
′The book gives an excellent account of the biomedical ′discourse′ in Africa and on how this discourse changed over time... Vaughan explores in an interesting way the associations that were made in the colonial literature between notions of illness, gender and sexuality, madness, nature and the construction of the African.′
Times Higher Education Supplement ′An important and imaginative study of value to students of society and medicine in general′ Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
′This is an original and penetrating book written in a most attractive style and showing how much vivid material survives in neglected papers of colonial doctors.′ History Today
′Curing Their Ills is beautifully written; the complex argument is made disarmingly simple and clear. It must surely join the growing list of outstanding contemporary reinterpretations of imperial medicine and society.′ Journal of Historical Geography
"... Challenging and original. The overall thesis is compelling... ... The great value of Vaughan′s study is exactly its breadth and the way she explores a variety of diseases and different kinds of biomedical discourse. ... The ambition and novelty of this study must be welcomed, not least for the ways it shows how the history of colonial or tropical medicine can be linked to the wider social history of colonialism." Social History of Medicine
"... This is a rich and rewarding book that should have considerable appeal for scholars concerned with the interplay between medicine, culture and colonialism." Journal of Southern African Studies
