Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda by Marissa A. Mika (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda by Marissa A. Mika
• Melissa Graboyes and Marlee Odell

Marissa A. Mika. Africanizing Oncology: Creativity, Crisis, and Cancer in Uganda.New African Histories. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2021. xxiv + 260 pp. Ill. $80.00 ( 978-0-8214-2465-0).

In Africanizing Oncology, Marissa Mika provides an engaging and thought-provoking history of the Uganda Center Institute (UCI), a unit of the Mulago Hospital at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. The book is more than just a narrow institutional history or a medical history of a single disease, as she tells the story of how Uganda Africanized oncology. At the center of those efforts, and her story, are African experts, institute employees, and Ugandan patients. Throughout the book, Mika presents examples of Ugandans resourcefully providing care despite material constraints, political instability, and social challenges. She persuasively argues that oncology developed at the UCI through Ugandans adapting research, resources, infrastructures, and techniques to fit their unique (often challenging) circumstances. Africanizing Oncology is a creative, interdisciplinary work that serves as a model for how the history of medicine, science and technology studies (STS), and the history of science can be in productive conversation with African studies.

The book is well researched and carefully put together. Mika draws on a combination of historical and anthropological sources and methods, including UCI archival sources, months of ethnographic fieldwork at the UCI, forty formal oral histories with prominent individuals in the history of cancer in Uganda, twenty interviews with patient caregivers, and interviews with international colleagues based at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The book is organized into six chapters and a moving final epilogue. Chapters 1 through 4 offer a chronological history of cancer care and research in Uganda, starting with early colonial cancer research and the founding of the UCI in 1967. In these chapters readers see how physicians and researchers responded creatively during times of crisis. Mika describes how the UCI often operated under conditions of "normal [End Page 525] emergency" and had to continue care during times when "drugs were missing, gloves were rarely in stock, and blood was only to be found in the veins of relatives willing to donate" (pp. 101–2). Chapters 5 and 6 explore international partnerships and new investments by institutions such as the Fred Hutchinson Center.

Mika's work responds to and builds on Julie Livingston's groundbreaking 2012 book, Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic. Africanizing Oncology contributes much-needed geographical context from the eastern part of the continent, and Uganda is a compelling choice given the country's long history of biomedical contact. It is also a wonderful addition to Ugandan history and supports new directions in that field. The book is published as part of Ohio University Press's New African Histories series; the editors deserve praise for publishing creative, important books that increasingly include space for social science, STS, and medical topics.

Africanizing Oncology will be appropriate to teach with in anthropology, African history, and African studies classes or in courses that focus on African health/disease as long as students are allowed to engage with the entire book. The format doesn't allow for easy dipping into just one chapter, but it's a text that most undergraduate students would be able to read, appreciate, and learn from. Mika has made an important contribution to African history, the history of medicine, medical anthropology, STS, and African studies. As a work that centers Ugandan voices and actions on the oncology ward at UCI, it deserves to be widely read. [End Page 526]

Melissa Graboyes University of Oregon Marlee Odell University of Oregon Copyright © 2023 Johns Hopkins University Press ...