Book Review - Health, Healing, and Illness in African History

Rebekah Lee. (2021). Health, Healing, and Illness in African History. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Book review by Protichi Chatterjee

Rebekah Lee, currently employed at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, specialises in the biomedical history of sub-Saharan Africa. Her latest publication Health, Healing, and Illness in African History (2021) synthesises her classroom teaching and archival research on sub-Saharan public cultures of illness and healing in two parts. Part One focuses on expanding the public and popular history of health and modes of healing in sub-Saharan Africa, while Part Two takes up contemporary perspectives of diseases and illnesses on a case-by-case basis, for example, HIV-AIDS, tropical disease, and mental illness, and explains how the earlier colonial understanding of African health modifies the way these diseases and illnesses are understood by the popular global healthcare market.

Although Lee’s archives are explicitly historiographical, her work also engages with the notion of the popular through the concept of the vernacular. The vernacular, in the context of colonised lands, is not what the colonisers attempted to popularise and normalise amongst the colonised. Rather, it is the prevalent and persistent practices that survived below the threshold of the imposed colonial norms. These practices often did not jeopardise the colonial norms directly, but rather, were taken as irritating quirks according to the Western imperialist ideals. Encounters between colonial medical practitioners and local colonised Africans, Lee argues, reveal the difference between the Western and the vernacular conceptualisation of health, healing, and illnesses. The book covers a vast time period from 1800 to present-day sub-Saharan Africa in order to provide a comprehensive overview of how tensions between the Western, colonial biomedical models and the popular, vernacular modes of understanding illness have shaped the current sub-Saharan African point of view regarding public health measures. To do so, Lee’s work engages with found, ephemeral archives of not only stray family letters, photographs, medical bills and reports, but also personal testimonies by patients who refused to be uncritically subsumed under the colonial categories of the “ill” and “sick”. 

Her work contributes to the rapidly expanding field of medical decolonial and postcolonial historiography that complicates our existing popular concept of the emergence of the medical body. She questions the global and mostly Western, colonial public cultures of medicine and health that regard folk, indigenous, and Native concepts of health and healing as inferior to science-based medical practices. By conducting such large-scale research from the nineteenth century to present day manifestations of sub-Saharan African medical practices she effectively reveals how the construct of Western medicine, treatment, and the present-day global health industry that follows are colonial and neo-colonial tools of controlling public bodies as well as minds. Thus, this work falls within the proliferating scholarship of Nancy Rose Hunt, Megan Vaughan, among others, who establish a decolonial form of medical humanities, and draws on Frantz Fanon's works that demonstrate how colonialism and the colonized bodymind are intimately tied, thus, resulting in manifestations of madness as well as physical ailments. 

This work is particularly useful for advanced-level undergraduates who wish to learn how to conduct a historiographic research of public cultures-in-formation. Moreover, to the student of Popular Culture, this work demonstrates the difference between the popular and the vernacular, therefore, offering a more nuanced perspective on the ideological, neocolonial stakes involved in working with popular or pop culture. Lee also includes a section of “Further Resources” after every chapter that comes in as a handy primer of references that delineate methodologies, histories, archives, and theoretical works for students and teachers alike. Health, Healing, and Illness in African History (2021), offers an in-depth analysis of how certain global, popular perspectives on illnesses have been shaped by the colonising forces who dismissed vernacular modes of conceptualising health in favour of Western epistemologies of health and the human body.

By Line:

Protichi Chatterjee, Jawaharlal Nehru University

@protichichatterjee.bsky.social (Bluesky), https://in.linkedin.com/in/protichi-chatterjee (Linkedin)

Protichi Chatterjee is currently pursuing her PhD at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. Her work focuses on neurodivergent and mad visual representation, and at present, she is co-teaching a course on Language, Culture, and Cognition at her university.