Medical Exchange on the Gold Coast during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract

Historians of the Atlantic slave trade have argued that the inhabitants of the Gold Coast of West Africa participated in a system of cultural and material exchange during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that resulted in the diffusion and syncretism of ideas and practices. This position presumes that the cultures of the Gold Coast were transformed by centuries of contact with the peoples of the Atlantic Rim. Despite the intensive commercial contact between Europeans and Africans during this period, the exchange of medical ideas, healing practices, and medical material cultures was limited by both the disease environment of West Africa and by the cultural chauvinism of surgeons and healers. This article will demonstrate the necessity of investigating local and particular changes to cultures before conjecturing about the larger outcomes of trans-Atlantic exchange.

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