African Medical Pluralism

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. Carolyn Sargent is Professor of Anthropology and Affiliated Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Maternity, Medicine, and Power. William C. Olsen lectures in the African Studies Program at Georgetown University. He is editor (with Walter E. A. van Beek) of Evil in Africa: Encounters with the Everyday (IUP).