Curing Their Ills

Curing Their Ills
Author: Megan Vaughan
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1991
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780804719711

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.

Curing Their Ills

Curing Their Ills
Author: Megan Vaughan
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2013-06-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0745678297

Curing their Ills traces the history of encounters between Europeanmedicine and African societies in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies. Vaughan's detailed examination of medical discourse ofthe period reveals its shifting and fragmented nature, highlightsits use in the creation of the colonial subject in Africa, andexplores the conflict between its pretensions to scientificneutrality and its political and cultural motivations. The book includes chapters on the history of psychiatry in Africa,on the treatment of venereal diseases, on the memoirs of European'Jungle Doctors', and on mission medicine. In exploring therepresentations of disease as well as medical practice, Curingtheir Ills makes a fascinating and original contribution to bothmedical history and the social history of Africa.

Creating the Creole Island

Creating the Creole Island
Author: Megan Vaughan
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2005-02
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9780822333999

The island of Mauritius lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 550 miles east of Madagascar. Uninhabited until the arrival of colonists in the late sixteenth century, Mauritius was subsequently populated by many different peoples as successive waves of colonizers and slaves arrived at its shores. The French ruled the island from the early eighteenth century until the early nineteenth. Throughout the 1700s, ships brought men and women from France to build the colonial population and from Africa and India as slaves. In Creating the Creole Island, the distinguished historian Megan Vaughan traces the complex and contradictory social relations that developed on Mauritius under French colonial rule, paying particular attention to questions of subjectivity and agency. Combining archival research with an engaging literary style, Vaughan juxtaposes extensive analysis of court records with examinations of the logs of slave ships and of colonial correspondence and travel accounts. The result is a close reading of life on the island, power relations, colonialism, and the process of cultural creolization. Vaughan brings to light complexities of language, sexuality, and reproduction as well as the impact of the French Revolution. Illuminating a crucial period in the history of Mauritius, Creating the Creole Island is a major contribution to the historiography of slavery, colonialism, and creolization across the Indian Ocean.

Curing Medicare

Curing Medicare
Author: Andy Lazris
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2016-05-19
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1501703870

Andy Lazris, MD, is a practicing primary care physician who experiences the effects of Medicare policy on a daily basis. As a result, he believes that the way we care for our elderly has taken a wrong turn and that Medicare is complicit in creating the very problems it seeks to solve. Aging is not a disease to be cured; it is a life stage to be lived. Lazris argues that aggressive treatments cannot change that fact but only get in the way and decrease quality of life. Unfortunately, Medicare's payment structure and rules deprive the elderly of the chance to pursue less aggressive care, which often yields the most humane and effective results. Medicare encourages and will pay more readily for hospitalization than for palliative and home care. It encourages and pays for high-tech assaults on disease rather than for the primary care that can make a real difference in the lives of the elderly. Lazris offers straightforward solutions to ensure Medicare’s solvency through sensible cost-effective plans that do not restrict patient choice or negate the doctor-patient relationship. Using both data and personal stories, he shows how Medicare needs to change in structure and purpose as the population ages, the physician pool becomes more specialized, and new medical technology becomes available. Curing Medicare demonstrates which medical interventions (medicines, tests, procedures) work and which can be harmful in many common conditions in the elderly; the harms and benefits of hospitalization; the current culture of long-term care; and how Medicare often promotes care that is ineffective, expensive, and contrary to what many elderly patients and their families really want.

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa

A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa
Author: Roy Richard Grinker
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 483
Release: 2019-02-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1119251486

An essential collection of scholarly essays on the anthropology of Africa, offering a thorough introduction to the most important topics in this evolving and diverse field of study The study of the cultures of Africa has been central to the methodological and theoretical development of anthropology as a discipline since the late 19th-century. As the anthropology of Africa has emerged as a distinct field of study, anthropologists working in this tradition have strived to build a disciplinary conversation that recognizes the diversity and complexity of modern and ancient African cultures while acknowledging the effects of historical anthropology on the present and future of the field of study. A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa is a collection of insightful essays covering the key questions and subjects in the contemporary anthropology of Africa with a key focus on addressing the topics that define the contemporary discipline. Written and edited by a team of leading cultural anthropologists, it is an ideal introduction to the most important topics in the field, both those that have consistently been a part of the critical dialogue and those that have emerged as the central questions of the discipline’s future. Beginning with essays on the enduring topics in the study of African cultures, A Companion to the Anthropology of Africa provides a foundation in the contemporary critical approach to subjects of longstanding interest. With these subjects as a groundwork, later essays address decolonization, the postcolonial experience, and questions of modern identity and definition, providing representation of the diverse thinking and scholarship in the modern anthropology of Africa.

Quackery

Quackery
Author: Lydia Kang
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2017-10-17
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1523501855

What won’t we try in our quest for perfect health, beauty, and the fountain of youth? Well, just imagine a time when doctors prescribed morphine for crying infants. When liquefied gold was touted as immortality in a glass. And when strychnine—yes, that strychnine, the one used in rat poison—was dosed like Viagra. Looking back with fascination, horror, and not a little dash of dark, knowing humor, Quackery recounts the lively, at times unbelievable, history of medical misfires and malpractices. Ranging from the merely weird to the outright dangerous, here are dozens of outlandish, morbidly hilarious “treatments”—conceived by doctors and scientists, by spiritualists and snake oil salesmen (yes, they literally tried to sell snake oil)—that were predicated on a range of cluelessness, trial and error, and straight-up scams. With vintage illustrations, photographs, and advertisements throughout, Quackery seamlessly combines macabre humor with science and storytelling to reveal an important and disturbing side of the ever-evolving field of medicine.

Curing the Colonizers

Curing the Colonizers
Author: Eric T. Jennings
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2006-10-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822338222

Combines the histories of empire, leisure, tourism, culture, and medicine to explain how therapeutic spas for colonists facilitated French imperialism between 1830 and 1962.

Decolonizing Sociology

Decolonizing Sociology
Author: Ali Meghji
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2021-01-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1509541969

Sociology, as a discipline, was born at the height of global colonialism and imperialism. Over a century later, it is yet to shake off its commitment to colonial ways of thinking. This book explores why, and how, sociology needs to be decolonized. It analyses how sociology was integral in reproducing the colonial order, as dominant sociologists constructed theories either assuming or proving the supposed barbarity and backwardness of colonized people. Ali Meghji reveals how colonialism continues to shape the discipline today, dominating both social theory and the practice of sociology, how exporting the Eurocentric sociological canon erased social theories from the Global South, and how sociologists continue to ignore the relevance of coloniality in their work. This guide will be necessary reading for any student or proponent of sociology. In opening up the work of other decolonial advocates and under-represented thinkers to readers, Meghji offers key suggestions for what teachers and students can do to decolonize sociology. With curriculum reform, innovative teaching and a critical awareness of these issues, it is possible to make sociology more equitable on a global scale.

Desperate Remedies

Desperate Remedies
Author: Andrew Scull
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 513
Release: 2022-05-17
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0674276469

A Telegraph Book of the Year A Washington Post Notable Work A Times Book of the Year A Hughes Award Finalist “An indisputable masterpiece...comprehensive, fascinating, and persuasive.” —Wall Street Journal “Compulsively readable...Scull has joined his wide-ranging reporting and research with a humane perspective on matters that many of us continue to look away from.” —Daphne Merkin, The Atlantic “I would recommend this fascinating, alarming, and alerting book to anybody. For anyone referred to a psychiatrist it is surely essential.” —The Spectator “Meticulously researched and beautifully written, and even funny at times.” —The Guardian “Brimming with wisdom and brio, this masterful work spans the history of psychiatry. Exceedingly well-researched, wide-ranging, provocative in its conclusions, and magically compact, it is riveting from start to finish. Mark my words, Desperate Remedies will soon be a classic.” —Susannah Cahalan, author of Brain on Fire From the birth of the asylum to the latest drug trials, Desperate Remedies brings together a galaxy of mind doctors working in and out of institutional settings: psychologists and psychoanalysts, neuroscientists and cognitive behavioral therapists, as well as patients and their families desperate for relief. One of the most provocative thinkers writing about psychiatry today, Andrew Scull carefully reconstructs the rise and fall of state-run mental hospitals to explain why so many of the mentally ill are now on the street, and why victims of experimental therapies were so often women. He reveals how drug companies expanded their reach to treat a growing catalog of ills, while deliberately concealing the side effects of drugs now routinely prescribed from childhood through senescence. Carefully researched and compulsively readable, this passionate and compassionate account of America’s long battle with mental illness challenges us to rethink our deepest assumptions about how we think and feel.

Curing the Colonizers

Curing the Colonizers
Author: Eric T. Jennings
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2006-10-25
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0822388278

“Beware! Against the poison that is Africa, there is but one antidote: Vichy.” So ran a 1924 advertisement for one of France’s main spas. Throughout the French empire, spas featuring water cures, often combined with “climatic” cures, thrived during the nineteenth century and the twentieth. Water cures and high-altitude resorts were widely believed to serve vital therapeutic and even prophylactic functions against tropical disease and the tropics themselves. The Ministry of the Colonies published bulletins accrediting a host of spas thought to be effective against tropical ailments ranging from malaria to yellow fever; specialized guidebooks dispensed advice on the best spas for “colonial ills.” Administrators were granted regular furloughs to “take the waters” back home in France. In the colonies, spas assuaged homesickness by creating oases of France abroad. Colonizers frequented spas to maintain their strength, preserve their French identity, and cultivate their difference from the colonized. Combining the histories of empire, leisure, tourism, culture, and medicine, Eric T. Jennings sheds new light on the workings of empire by examining the rationale and practice of French colonial hydrotherapy between 1830 and 1962. He traces colonial acclimatization theory and the development of a “science” of hydrotherapy appropriate to colonial spaces, and he chronicles and compares the histories of spas in several French colonies—Guadeloupe, Madagascar, Tunisia, and Réunion—and in France itself. Throughout Curing the Colonizers, Jennings illuminates the relationship between indigenous and French colonial therapeutic knowledge as well as the ultimate failure of the spas to make colonialism physically or morally safe for the French.