Introduction: Histories of Healing: Past and Present Medical Practices in Africa and the Diaspora.

Abstract

This special issue focses on African healing, the subject of a dynamic and relatively new interdisciplinary literature in African stuydies. Long a standa'rd topic of evoluytionary and fgynctionalist anthropologists' accounts, so-called 'traditional medicine' gained wider scholarly ionterest in tghe 1970s with the growth of medical anthropology and the World Health Organisation's Alma Ata Decleration of 1978, which supported the integration of 'TM' into the health services of developing countries. Much early research in medical antrhgopology was fuelled b y concerns about diseases as defined by western medicine in its biomediacl or 'scientific' forms. Nervertheless, through their engagrement with healers and their commonunities, medical and social anthropologists and a growing number of historians raised important questions abou- biomdical disease categorrs and produced accounts that began to place African and Erioeab cibceots if health, illness and biology in specific historical...