Sonjo tribe: medicine
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Date
1948
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Fosbrooke
Abstract
In studying and analyzing the medical ideas of a primitive tribe one IX makes certain assumptions, implicitly or explicitly, about the mentality of the people, early ethnologists who wrote notes on primitive medicine tended to assume that the mental processes of primitive man were different from those of modern man. The theory proposed by the French anthropologist Levy-Bruhl that the reasoning of primitive people was prelogical or mystical was widely accepted. A large part of primitive medical customs were described as "magical" with the implication that they were illogical and irrational. Medical historians often made similar assumptions in analyzing archaic documents. The late Professor J.H. Breasted in his classic translation and analysis of the Edwin Smith Surgical pyrus, an ancient Egyptian medical treatise, was delighted to find an ancient Egyptian doctor who las beginning to think logically in terms of cause and effect. The fullest account of the medicine of an Arfican tribe to date is to be found in a book written Dr. Harley, a missionary doctor, on the Mano Tribe of Liberia. Dr. Harley listed a number of Mano medical procedures as magical and irrational. He then on to explain that from the native viewpoint these procedures are rational. This leads to the question of what we mean by "rational".
Description
Available in print form, East Africana Collection, Dr. Wilbert Chagula Library, (EAF FOS S6)
Keywords
Sonjo, Tribe, Medicine
Citation
Fosbrooke, H. A(1948). Sonjo tribe; medicine