Global Health in Africa

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.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.

"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) "This volume illustrates very well that the current day applicability of the core concepts of global health [have] need of the serious critical historical and cultural examination that this volume (and no others that I know of) now provides in its richest and most useful form." "[Global Health in Africa] demonstrates that Africa's global health history is rich, important, and under-researched. The strength of this book lies in the breadth and depth of the studies presented in one volume." "Provides a variety of case studies from different parts of the continent and different historical periods.… The cumulative effect of the chapters impresses on the reader the scope of the experimentation that has been done and that continues to be done on African bodies."