Curing Their Ills

Curing their Ills traces the history of encounters betweenEuropean medicine and African societies in the nineteenth andtwentieth centuries. Vaughan's detailed examination of medicaldiscourse of the period reveals its shifting and fragmented nature,highlights its use in the creation of the colonial subject inAfrica, and explores the conflict between its pretensions toscientific neutrality and its political and cultural motivations. The book includes chapters on the history of psychiatry inAfrica, on the treatment of venereal diseases, on the memoirs ofEuropean 'Jungle Doctors', and on mission medicine. In exploringthe representations of disease as well as medical practice,Curing their Ills makes a fascinating and originalcontribution to both medical history and the social history ofAfrica.