Thomas Kuhn wrote that ?a paradigm is prerequisite to perception.? Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery, an exciting, chronologically expansive, global volume that liberates African diasporic medicine from the paradigm of the dominant Western medical gaze. Yet it is one thing to escape the confines of a straitened medical gaze and quite another to meticulously document the wider historical prospect. This dynamic collection of papers from a 2018 symposium at Rice University does both persuasively.
Its compulsively readable, harmonious and far-ranging assortment of papers limns parallels between sangradores and European barber-surgeons, acknowledges the primacy of non-Western advances such as smallpox variolation and details the integration of social and musical dimensions to supplement biophysiological care that once were widely dismissed as cultural curiosities of ?primitives?. Engaging writing and arresting insights stud its pages.
You won?t be able to put this book down and you will emerge with a fresh, deep education in the contemporary understanding and future directions of medical history largely freed of the historical blinders of race.