Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa Medical Encounters, 1500–1850 Global Health Histories Series

In this ambitious analysis of medical encounters in Central and West Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade, Kalle Kananoja focuses on African and European perceptions of health, disease and healing. Arguing that the period was characterised by continuous knowledge exchange, he shows that indigenous natural medicine was used by locals and non-Africans alike. The mobility and circulation of healing techniques and materials was an important feature of the early modern Black Atlantic world. African healing specialists not only crossed the Atlantic to the Americas, but also moved within and between African regions to offer their services. At times, patients, Europeans included, travelled relatively long distances in Africa to receive treatment. Highlighting cross-cultural medical exchanges, Kananoja shows that local African knowledge was central to shaping responses to illness, providing a fresh, global perspective on African medicine and vernacular science in the early modern world.

1. Healing (and harming) specialists: plural medicine in Angola and Kongo; 2. Cross-Cultural experiments: the materiality of medicine in West-Central Africa; 3. 'Much better suited than we are, as regards their health care': African botanical expertise and medical knowledge on the Gold Coast; 4. Remedies on the spot: science, agricultural development and botanical knowledge in Sierra Leone ca. 1800; 5. Healers, hospitals and medicines: European medical practice in Angola; 6. Treating their symptoms: limits of humoural medicine; 7. Migrations: medical geography in the Southern Atlantic; 8. Conclusion.

Kalle Kananoja is a senior researcher at the University of Oulu. He is an expert in early modern Atlantic history and has published articles on Angolan and Afro-Brazilian religious and medical culture. Kananoja is the co-editor of Healers and Empires: Healing as Hybrid and Contested Knowledge in Global History, 1700s–1900s (2019).