Native African Medicine

Harvard University Press has partnered with De Gruyter to make available for sale worldwide virtually all in-copyright HUP books that had become unavailable since their original publication. The 2,800 titles in the “e-ditions” program can be purchased individually as PDF eBooks or as hardcover reprint (“print-on-demand”) editions via the “Available from De Gruyter” link above. They are also available to institutions in ten separate subject-area packages that reflect the entire spectrum of the Press’s catalog. More about the E-ditions Program »

George Harley, a medical missionary in Liberia, has spent many years at the Ganta Dispensary on the upper St. John River near the border of French Guinea. In the present work he gives an excellent ethnographic picture of the Mano tribesmen of northeastern Liberia, agriculturalists whose whole political and social system is bound up in a graded secret society called the Poro Bush. This is, or was, an initiation school, held every six years, in which the adolescent boys are given instruction in three groups: one for the commoners in arts, crafts, and farming; one for the sons of noblemen in government and leadership; and one for practitioners of the magical arts, including medicine. The Mano curative practices may be divided into those which are wholly overt or practical, in our sense, those which are purely magical, and those which combine the two principles. Their use of drugs is their chief claim to medical renown, but they are also good at bone-setting and perform some surgery. The book will be valuable to both medical men and anthropologists.