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Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820-1948. By Karen E. Flint. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. xiv + 274 pp. Illustrations, glossary, bibliography, notes, index. Paper, $26.95. ISBN: 978-0-821-41850-5.
Reviewed by Preston Bakshi
The history of the business of medicine is currently under revision by historians who are challenging the field's traditional categories of analysis. "Biomedicine" and "indigenous medicine," which generations of scholars have treated as bounded, opposite, and mutually exclusive systems, are now understood as permeable and mutually constitutive in the ways they are constructed and reconstructed; the boundaries between them have been drawn, transgressed, and reimagined. Historian Karen E. Flint must be considered among the leaders in this movement, precisely because she demonstrates, in Healing Traditions, that "traditional" medicine in South Africa, far from being static, changed over time in the high-stakes contest between biomedicine and African healers. Biomedicine and traditional medicine formed a point of cross-cultural contact, where both biomedical scientists and African healers translated, appropriated, and critiqued each other's medical systems and techniques. African healers were not passive anachronisms; nor did they resist biomedical science. Instead, Africans actively translated biomedical processes into their own indigenous grammars of power, in order to compete in an increasingly lucrative medical marketplace. Not only does Flint successfully unpack the traditional aspects of South African medicine; she also clarifies the traditional use of analytic terms in historical epistemology.
Healing Traditions is organized into two parts, the first of which explains change over time in the medical, social, and political roles of healers in the Zulu kingdom from 1820 to 1879. In chapter one, Flint corrects traditional historical depictions of African therapeutics,...