Suturing New Medical Histories of Africa

'Suturing' suggests closing a wound, making an incision, editing a film, or stitching together parts, locations, and points of view. The word is a helpful one for today's historians of disease, suffering, and medical practice in Africa. Whether focusing on a hospital or shrine, on malaria, trauma, witchcraft, or nursing, historians are grappling in new ways with problems of joining locations and viewpoints, of tethering pasts with the present. New challenges arise from thinking about Africa's place in today's world of global health and biosecurity, war zones and heritage monies, emerging medical markets and self-treatment devices. Suturing points to new kinds of creativity with sources, evidence, and interactivity. As new digital capacities transform how history is engaged and produced, the word suturing helps to draw attention to the question of audiences and publics for African medical histories in the 21st century, as demonstrated in this book.