Overview

This book explores cross-cultural medical encounters involving non-Western healers in a variety of imperial contexts from the Arctic, Asia, Africa, Americas and the Caribbean. It highlights contests over healing, knowledge and medicines through the frameworks of hybridisation and pluralism. The intertwined histories of medicine, empire and early globalisation influenced the ways in which millions of people encountered and experienced suffering, healing and death. In an increasingly global search for therapeutics and localised definition of acceptable healing, networks and mobilities played key roles. Healers’ engagements with politics, law and religion underline the close connections between healing, power and authority. They also reveal the agency of healers, sufferers and local societies, in encounters with modernising imperial states, medical science and commercialisation. The book questions and complements the traditional narratives of triumphant biomedicine, reminding readersthat ‘traditional’ medical cultures and practitioners did not often disappear, but rather underwent major changes in the increasingly interconnected world. 

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9783030154905

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Markku Hokkanen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, University of Oulu, Finland. His previous publications include the monograph Medicine, Mobility and the Empire: Nyasaland Networks, 1859-1960 (2017) and the co-edited collection Encountering Crises of the Mind: Madness, Culture and Society, 1200s-1900s (2018).  Kalle Kananoja is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has published articles on precolonial Atlantic African and colonial Brazilian history.

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