African medical pluralism / edited by William C. Olsen and Carolyn Sargent.

Date:
[2017]
  • Books

About this work

Description

In most places on the African continent, multiple health care options exist and patients draw on a therapeutic continuum that ranges from traditional medicine and religious healing to the latest in biomedical technology. The ethnographically based essays in this volume highlight African ways of perceiving sickness, making sense of and treating suffering, and thinking about health care to reveal the range and practice of everyday medicine in Africa through historical, political, and economic contexts.

Publication/Creation

Bloomington and Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, [2017]

Physical description

viii, 270 pages : black and white illustrations ; 23 cm

Contents

Introduction / William C. Olsen and Carolyn Sargent -- Biomedicine and African healing -- The value of secrets: pragmatic healers and proprietary knowledge / Stacey Langwick -- Body and sunsum: stroke in Asante / William C. Olsen -- Spirits and pills who are against children: medico-rituals and assisted reproductive technologies in a Tuareg couple's quest for parenthood / Susan J. Rasmussen -- Science in the moral space of health and healing paradigms in western equatorial Africa / John M. Janzen -- Medical pluralism revisted: a memoir / Brooke Grundfest Schoepf -- Symptoms and therapeutic pluralities -- Wishful doing: journeying in a Nigerian medical landscape / Ulrika Trovalla -- The individualization of illness: bewitchment and the mental in postcolonial Tanzania / Koen Stroeken -- Ihahamuka-PTSD in postgenocidal Rwanda: culture, continuity and change in Rwandan therapeutics / Christopher C. Taylor -- Hospital ethnography -- Ear infections, malnutrition, and circuitous health care treatments in Zaria, Nigeria / Elisha Renne -- Therapeutic eclecticism and cancer care in a Kenyan hospital ward / Benson A. Mulemi -- Elusive paths, fluid care: seeking healing and protection in the Republic of Benin / Carolyn Sargent and James Leslie Kennell -- Legitimate care, dangerous care, and childbirth in an urban African community / Claire Wendland -- Afterword / Arthur Kleinman.

Bibliographic information

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Type/Technique

Languages

Where to find it

  • LocationStatus
    History of Medicine
    CD.1
    Open shelves

Permanent link

Identifiers

ISBN

  • 9780253024770
  • 0253024773
  • 9780253024916
  • 0253024919