Healers and Empires in Global History

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Healers and Empires in Global History: Healing as Hybrid and Contested Knowledge

   • Markku Hokkanen, Kalle Kananoja

   Pages 1-26

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3. Traditional Arctic Healing and Medicines of Modernisation in Finnish and Swedish Lapland

   • Ritva Kylli

   Pages 27-53

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4. Reports on Encounters of Medical Cultures: Two Physicians in Sweden’s Medical and Colonial Connections in the Late Eighteenth Century

   • Saara-Maija Kontturi

   Pages 55-79

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5. Tibetan Medicine and Buddhism in the Soviet Union: Research, Repression, and Revival, 1922–1991

   • Ivan Sablin

   Pages 81-114

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6. Contestation, Redefinition and Healers’ Tactics in Colonial Southern Africa

   • Markku Hokkanen

   Pages 115-148

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7. Complicating Hybrid Medical Practices in the Tropics: Examining the Case of São Tomé and Príncipe, 1850–1926

   • Rafaela Jobbitt

   Pages 149-178

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8. Doctors, Healers and Charlatans in Brazil: A Short History of Ideas, c. 1650–1950

   • Kalle Kananoja

   Pages 179-201

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9. Risking Obeah: A Spiritual Infrastructure in the Danish West Indies, c. 1800–1848

   • Gunvor Simonsen

   Pages 203-237

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10. Toward a Typology of Nineteenth-Century Lakota Magico-Medico-Ritual Specialists

    • David C. Posthumus

    Pages 239-271

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11. Back Matter

    Pages 273-279

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This book explores cross-cultural medical encounters involving non-Western healers in a variety of imperial contexts from the Arctic, Asia, Africa, Americas and the Caribbean. It highlights contests over healing, knowledge and medicines through the frameworks of hybridisation and pluralism. The intertwined histories of medicine, empire and early globalisation influenced the ways in which millions of people encountered and experienced suffering, healing and death. In an increasingly global search for therapeutics and localised definition of acceptable healing, networks and mobilities played key roles. Healers’ engagements with politics, law and religion underline the close connections between healing, power and authority. They also reveal the agency of healers, sufferers and local societies, in encounters with modernising imperial states, medical science and commercialisation. The book questions and complements the traditional narratives of triumphant biomedicine, reminding readersthat ‘traditional’ medical cultures and practitioners did not often disappear, but rather underwent major changes in the increasingly interconnected world. 

• 1700s, 1800s, 1900s
• History of medicine
• Indigenous healers
• Medical pluralism
• Arctic
• Americas
• Caribbean
• Soviet Union
• Africa
• Folk healers
• Imperial connections
• History of ritual

• Department of History, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland

  Markku Hokkanen

• African Studies, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

  Kalle Kananoja

Markku Hokkanen is Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, University of Oulu, Finland. His previous publications include the monograph Medicine, Mobility and the Empire: Nyasaland Networks, 1859-1960 (2017) and the co-edited collection Encountering Crises of the Mind: Madness, Culture and Society, 1200s-1900s (2018). 



Kalle Kananoja is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has published articles on precolonial Atlantic African and colonial Brazilian history.

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