Healing Traditions African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820-1948

"(Flint) should be applauded for her thorough analysis of a very complex subject during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when western biomedicine was asserting itself worldwide as the dominant profession." (Journal of Medicine and Allied Sciences) "Healing Traditions greatly illuminates the business of medicine within its colonial and postcolonial contexts.... Flint's work not only offers an excellent model for comparative study; it also suggests that the situation in South Africa is just one important part of a world historical process of biomedical market expansion." (Business History Review) "Flint's work is of interest not only to historians of medicine, but also social-cultural historians working with topics as varied as witchcraft and professionalization.... Taken as a whole, the work demonstrates that the syncretic nature of the current South African medical environment results from almost 200 years of dynamic cultural exchange and competition." (Canadian Journal of History) "Healing Traditions is a comprehensive work that substantially adds to our knowledge of how medicine and power have intertwined in South Africa over the past two hundred years." (Technology and Culture) "An extremely timely book that will have immediate impact on the heated current debates across several fields of study, forming part of a new and exciting debate emerging around new South African history. The book has great potential to have a measurable impact on the teaching of medicine and health ... and the various pathways to healing and health in our current HIV/AIDS pandemic." "...lucid and detailed.... a vivid picture of the polyculturalism underlying African traditional medicine, and of the economic, social, and political history of a complex medical marketplace." (American Historical Review) "A well-researched and argued book that contributes to the discussion over cultural imperialism by problematizing current ideas of biomedicine's colonial hegemony." (CHOICE)