Global Health in Africa
Historical Perspectives on Disease Control

“An immensely valuable collection…Global Health in Africa should inspire a new generation of local historians to locate the medical in African histories.”

Social History of Medicine

“For anyone looking for a book to assign to undergraduates, or to recommend to students who are interested in the field of global health, the collection edited by Giles-Vernick and Webb, Global Health in Africa, is [an] obvious choice.”

African Studies Review

“Taken as a collective, the essays offer other lessons to those interested in African public and global health. The most striking theme across the volume are the ways in which health interventions can unintentionally contribute to ill health and create tense relationships with medical practitioners.… A second theme is how individual rights are frequently imperiled by mass campaigns, particularly ones where the line between cure and prevention is blurred.… The collection makes the case well for including historical perspectives in approaching global health, but it also demonstrates how including a global health frame can contribute to histories of disease, health and healing in Africa.”

H-Net

“The distinctive contribution of the work is its explicit historical orientation…. Importantly, the historical perspective…highlights the long-term continuities, unquestioned assumptions and moral ambiguities that characterize global health initiatives in Africa. The breadth and depth of the contributions ensures that the book comes a long way in achieving its objective to contribute to the development of a new field of global health history.”

Comparativ

Global Health in Africa is a first exploration of selected histories of global health initiatives in Africa. The collection addresses some of the most important interventions in disease control, including mass vaccination, large-scale treatment and/or prophylaxis campaigns, harm reduction efforts, and nutritional and virological research.The chapters in this collection are organized in three sections that evaluate linkages between past, present, and emergent. Part I, “Looking Back,” contains four chapters that analyze colonial-era interventions and reflect upon their implications for contemporary interventions. Part II, “The Past in the Present,” contains essays exploring the historical dimensions and unexamined assumptions of contemporary disease control programs. Part III, “The Past in the Future,” examines two fields of public health intervention in which efforts to reduce disease transmission and future harm are premised on an understanding of the past.

This much-needed volume brings together international experts from the disciplines of demography, anthropology, and historical epidemiology. Covering health initiatives from smallpox vaccinations to malaria control to HIV campaigns, Global Health in Africa offers a first comprehensive look at some of global health’s most important challenges.

Tamara Giles-Vernick conducts anthropological and historical research on hepatitis B and C transmission and control, zoonoses, buruli ulcer, and the emergence of HIV in Africa. Based at the Epidemiology of Emerging Diseases Unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, she has published two books and multiple articles on global public health, environmental history, conservation, and oral historiography.   More info →

James L. A. Webb, Jr. is a Professor of History at Colby College. He is the editor of the Ohio University Press series Perspectives on Global Health and the Series in Ecology and History and the author of Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria and The Long Struggle against Malaria in Tropical Africa. He is currently writing a book on the historical epidemiology of diarrheal diseases.   More info →