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  1. Home
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  3. Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa
  • Cited by 38
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
February 2021
Print publication year:
2021
Online ISBN:
9781108868020
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108868020
Subjects:
Area Studies, African Studies, History, European Studies, History of Medicine, African History
Series:
Global Health Histories
Information

Book description

In this ambitious analysis of medical encounters in Central and West Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, Kalle Kananoja focuses on African and European perceptions of health, disease and healing. Arguing that the period was characterised by continuous knowledge exchange, he shows that indigenous natural medicine was used by locals and non-Africans alike. The mobility and circulation of healing techniques and materials was an important feature of the early modern Black Atlantic world. African healing specialists not only crossed the Atlantic to the Americas, but also moved within and between African regions to offer their services. At times, patients, Europeans included, travelled relatively long distances in Africa to receive treatment. Highlighting cross-cultural medical exchanges, Kananoja shows that local African knowledge was central to shaping responses to illness, providing a fresh, global perspective on African medicine and vernacular science in the early modern world.

Awards

Winner, 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Titles

Reviews

‘An innovative and essential study on public health in the Black Atlantic. Kananoja traces the mobility of West Central African healers across the Atlantic, as specialists on medical knowledge and spiritual power. This is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on European appropriation of African knowledge, West Central Africa, and early modern medicine and natural history.'

Mariana P. Candido - Emory University

‘Building on, and responding to, the increasingly extensive scholarship on African diasporas of the Americas, Kalle Kananoja returns readers to the other side of the Atlantic, where he explores the creative interplay between the material and spiritual worlds of the Portuguese and Atlantic Africans. He convincingly shows the ways in which plural medicine – underwritten everywhere by indigenous knowledge – sustained cross-cultural interactions throughout the long eighteenth century, and proved formative for later colonial and metropolitan pharmacopoeias.'

Hugh Cagle - University of Utah

‘Kalle Kanonoja has created a groundbreaking work in the study of medicine in Africa and in the larger Atlantic world. In this clearly written and marvelously researched contribution, Kanonoja shows that African medical systems were quite similar to those of Europe in the pre-scientific era; with some herbal knowledge and some religious hope. This work will be critical to redefining the way Africa is presented in the history of science and medicine.'

John Thornton - Boston University

‘… this book marks a significant step forward in our understanding of how the production of knowledge-in the medical field as well as in others, such as geography-depended upon interaction between European men and African men and women, as well as upon the mobility of these people.’

Adam Jones Source: Metascience

'… important, insightful work on the place of African healing and knowledge in the larger Atlantic world … the book focuses on how people shared knowledge and the larger consequences of those connections and documents the similarities among the medical knowledge and practices of West Africa, Europe, and the Americas … Highly recommended.'

T. M. Reese Source: Choice

‘There is much to admire about Kananoja’s book … [it] is an important corrective to works that largely focus on the anglophone Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and should be read seriously by historians of medicine and of early colonialism.’

Tim Lockley Source: The British Journal for the History of Science

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Contents

Contents
  • 2 - Cross-Cultural Experiments
    pp 50-79
  • The Materiality of Medicine in West-Central Africa
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