Robert Woods and  Chris Galley, Mrs Stone & Dr Smellie: Eighteenth-Century Midwives and their Patients (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2014), pp. vii, 544, £80, hardback, ISBN: 978-1-78138-141-0.

The book highlights how mission stations became important arenas, not only for enabling transnational flows of knowledge, but also for cross-cultural exchanges of knowledge between locals and foreign sisters. One would have expected that, throughout the history of Catholic medical missions, missionaries would have worked hard to marginalise indigenous medical practices. But Wall demonstrates that, with time, sisters adjusted their relationships with indigenous healers and were willing to share medical knowledge with them as much as the sisters also learned about the clinical efficacy of indigenous medicine (120). In Tanzania, the work of Mangangas was highly appreciated by the Maryknoll sisters (122–4). In Ghana, as part of their efforts in supporting rural health care, HFH introduced the Primary Health for Indigenous Healers Programme. And in Ghana and Uganda, the sisters also trained Traditional Birth Attendants (122–42). Mann argues that such intercultural exchanges of medical knowledge were ‘useful as the sisters became more a part of their communities, living and working among contrasting worldviews about religion and medicine’ (124). One would have expected to read more about how African sisters as nurses navigated the Biafran war in the wake of international medical personnel leaving eastern Nigeria. In addition, a sustained analysis of the responses to the changing disease environment as a result of HIV/AIDS would have been fascinating. Nonetheless, Into Africa is a good read that complicates narratives on the intersections between healthcare and religion in women’s history. It does an excellent job of untangling the often held assumptions that religion and modernity oppose each other by foregrounding the role of Catholic women’s adoption of science and technology in their work. This is a must read for everyone interested in the role of missionary women in not only providing health care to Africans, but also for their important role in humanitarian relief and social justice work in the era of decolonisation and independence in Sub-Saharan Africa.