Science and Medicine

This review considers three monographs that use innovative archival recovery techniques to expand our understanding of the connections between the history of science and medicine and sociopolitical and cultural phenomena across the early modern period to the present. Divided into three sections, our review first considers Kalle Kananoja’s Healing Knowledge in Atlantic Africa: Medical Encounters, 1500–1850, which demonstrates the ways that Atlantic African healers resisted colonial influence and adapted their practices to reflect innovative uses of global plant-based medicines. Part 2 of this review, Black Reproductive Health, examines Sara Clarke Kaplan’s The Black Reproductive: Unfree Labor and Insurgent Motherhood, which, importantly, revises longstanding assumptions about the ways that we understand and document reproductive health and justice, especially in the American Black community. Part 3, ‘Healthy’ Eating, discusses Elizabeth A. Williams’s Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750–1950, which deconstructs the so-called connection between appetite and wellness in science and medicine. We have chosen to focus on these works both for the important new insights that they offer to the field of the history of science and because they each speak to contemporary crises in public health and health inequity that continue to affect our local and global landscapes. We suggest that works such as these have the capacity not only to expand our field but also to counteract narratives of white supremacy and other cultural beliefs that stigmatize and oppress; these works show us how expanding our understanding of the origins and current practices of medical knowledge beyond our traditional Western narratives can help provide healthier and more equitable forms of care and wellness.