New Directions and Challenges in Histories of Health, Healing and Medicine in South Africa

This Special Edition of Medical History is the first in this journal’s fifty-seven years’ history solely dedicated to histories of medicine, health and healing in South Africa, or indeed any African region. With one exception, the six articles featured here were presented at a workshop held in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa in August 2012, under the broad (and often shifting) umbrella theme of ‘New Directions in the Histories of Health, Healing and Medicine in African Contexts’. Hosted by ourselves, it was co-organised and supported by Professor Sanjoy Bhattacharya and the Centre for Global Health Histories, University of York,1 with financial support from the Wellcome Trust. The Workshop’s main objectives were to bring together – for in-depth discussions – scholars working on histories of health, healing and medicine in Africa, and more especially Southern Africa; to share works-in-progress and proposals for future research projects and publications; to support the emergence of upcoming senior graduate students from institutions based in Southern Africa; to position Southern Africa as a full partner in knowledge exchange, especially in the field of historical research; and to promote stronger partnerships between international and Africa-based scholars of health and medicine, and to discuss the formation of a network of medical historians, with regular meetings (perhaps biennially), to be held at venues in the Southern African region. In publishing this edition in 2014, it also seems an opportune moment to consider how, twenty years into its democratic dispensation, South Africanists are continuing to think and write about earlier debates and central concerns in the histories of health, healing and medicine, perhaps looking at them in new ways; and also to underscore how historically informed analyses may add insights to newer circumstances in twenty-first century South Africa. Over the past several decades, the international field of medical histories of the African continent has been growing steadily. Indeed, it can now be confidently asserted that scholarly investigation of the histories of medicine, health, healing and myriad related issues has become an essential lens through which to analyse and understand African regions, both past and present. In recent years, diverse subjects have been studied. Most notably, historical analyses have moved beyond consideration of homogenous or one-sided coloniser versus colonised healing encounters, or the celebratory triumphs of western medicine, to investigations of the critical limits and tensions produced by biomedicine