Medicalized Healing in East Africa

Abstract

For centuries, foreign notions of religion and medicine have divided African forms of healing into religious and medical aspects. This distinction developed into an institutional separation, which has proved problematic for African patients, who expect the previous unity of religious and medical aspects from their healers but are increasingly offered a medicalized, i.e. secular version of “traditional medicine” instead. There are different factors contributing to this discrepancy. For orthodox Muslims, Christian missionaries, and colonial doctors, while the use of herbs was acceptable, rituals controlling or addressing spirits mostly was not. Following the World Health Organization and the concept of “alternative medicine,” substances and experts came to be regulated by the state or scientifically researched in accordance with “biomedical” notions of efficacy and safety. Thus, elements that could be classified as religious by both functionalist and non-functionalist theories of religion were increasingly excluded, first in external perceptions and research, and later in legislation and social