Sunil Pandya, Medical Education in Western India: Grant Medical College and Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy’s Hospital (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), pp. xxiv+561, £70.99, hardback, ISBN: 9781527518056.

Abstract

Europe andAfrica as diagnoses of banzar – the psychological affliction of longing for home, derived from the Kimbundu word banza – emerged from the dungeons of the Atlantic slave trade and middle passage voyages during which many enslaved people suffered intense depression and committed suicide. Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa pushes historians of medicine to consider Atlantic Africa as a dynamic intellectual zone within the earlymodern globe. Franciso Buitrago’s list of herbal remedies from Arvore da vida is included as an appendix, and is a valuable text for appreciating the commingling of medical traditions in early eighteenth-century Angola. Kananoja’s discussion of individuals like Peter, Duffa and BetsyHeard provides an opportunity for scholars to consider the Atlantic African foundations of early modern science. Kananoja’s narrative engages a considerable archive of manuscript and printed materials, as well as material culture. One wonders to what extent their primarily textual research might link up to investigations into the colonialist histories of institutional repositories like academic herbaria, gardens and seed vaults. Kananoja’s book is a valuable addition to early modern histories of Atlantic African medicine, and will be of particular interest to scholars ofWest andWest Central Africa, Atlantic history and global histories of scientific exchange.