This study traces the history of encounters between European medicine and African societies in the 19th and 20th centuries. Vaughan's examination of medical discourse of the period reveals its shifting and fragmented nature, highlights its use in the creation of the colonial subject in Africa and explores the conflict between its pretensions to scientific neutrality and its political and cultural motivations. The book includes chapters on the history of psychiatry in Africa, on the treatment of venereal diseases, on the memoirs of European "jungle doctors" and on mission medicine.

Curing their ills: Colonial power and African illness

Megan Vaughan

Stanford Univ Pr

Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius

The island of Mauritius lies in the middle of the Indian Ocean, about 550 miles east of Madagascar. Uninhabited until the arrival of colonists in the late sixteenth century, Mauritius was subsequently populated by many different peoples as successive waves of colonizers and slaves arrived at its shores. The French ruled the island from the early eighteenth century until the early nineteenth. Throughout the 1700s, ships brought men and women from France to build the colonial population and from Africa and India as slaves. In Creating the Creole Island, the distinguished historian Megan Vaughan traces the complex and contradictory social relations that developed on Mauritius under French colonial rule, paying particular attention to questions of subjectivity and agency.Combining archival research with an engaging literary style, Vaughan juxtaposes extensive analysis of court records with examinations of the logs of slave ships and of colonial correspondence and travel accounts. The result is a close reading of life on the island, power relations, colonialism, and the process of cultural creolization. Vaughan brings to light complexities of language, sexuality, and reproduction as well as the impact of the French Revolution. Illuminating a crucial period in the history of Mauritius, Creating the Creole Island is a major contribution to the historiography of slavery, colonialism, and creolization across the Indian Ocean.

Duke University Press Books

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Megan Vaughan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Megan Vaughan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Megan Vaughan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Curing their ills: Colonial power and African illness

Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Mauritius