Sharing the Burden of Sickness

"Jonathan Roberts de-centers the narrative of 'medical progress' that is so often used to explain the history of health and medicine on the African continent. By doing so, he gives important weight to non-Western forms of medical care, and shows the ways in which these traditions have become intertwined with others to produce a hybrid approach to care."—Jessica Lynne Pearson

"Finally! A history of medicine in Africa that is not about witches' brew or European salvation. Roberts uncovers a world of medical choice amongst shared, shifting, and dynamic medical traditions."—Oluwatoyin Oduntan, Towson University

"In this fascinating, lucid book, Roberts challenges Western medical metanarrative by examining five therapeutic traditions on equal terms, convincingly demonstrating how each continuously adapted to new political, economic, and cultural circumstances in Accra, a cosmopolitan center of therapeutic pluralism. Roberts delivers an innovative history of this dynamic West African city, originally a fishing village and today a metropolis and Ghana's capital, a place that has always welcomed peoples, material cultures, religions, and therapeutic traditions from the hinterlands and across the oceans. Sharing the Burden of Sickness is a significant, compelling intervention in the literature on the history of healing."—Dennis Laumann, The University of Memphis, author of Colonial Africa, 1884-1994

"In this sweeping story of medicine in Ghana's capital city, Roberts vividly recounts the sagas of the many people who sought to heal Accra's residents since the 1600s. Writing with wit and warmth, he provides a balanced and nuanced view of how the people of Accra intertwined medical approaches in their quests for therapy—from Ga shrines, to Muslim amulets, Christian prayers,  injections, and imported patent medicines. Roberts convincingly argues that multiple healing approaches have coexisted in Accra up to the present, with Ga healers, charismatic Christian pastors, Muslim therapists, drug peddlers, and Ghanaian physicians and nurses all contributing to healthcare simultaneously. His detailed excavation of how Ghanaians combined different healing alternatives over time and made biomedicine their own is a critical contribution to debates on the limits of biopower in colonial and postcolonial periods."—Abena Dove Osseo-Asare, author of Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa