New Book: Africanizing Oncology
“Based on rich historical and ethnographic research, Africanizing Oncology provides an intimate, and at times harrowing view of the day to day activities of care, research, and healing that permitted physicians, researchers, nurses, and patients to survive civil war, structural adjustment, and massive global disparities in health resources to build and sustain an African cancer research institute. The book is a remarkable achievement.”
— Randall M. Packard, author or A History of Global Health: Interventions into the Lives of Other Peoples
Africanizing Oncology describes the political, social, technological, and biomedical dimensions of how Ugandans created, sustained, and transformed the Uganda Cancer Institute over the past half century.
With insights from science and technology studies and contemporary African history, Marissa Mika’s work joins a new wave of contemporary histories of the political, technological, moral, and intellectual aspirations and actions of Africans after independence. It contributes to a growing body of work on chronic disease and situates the contemporary urgency of the mounting cancer crisis on the continent in a longer history of global cancer research and care.
“In this historically and ethnographically rich book, Marissa Mika shows how African doctors and nurses practice oncology by creating, adapting, and transforming medical infrastructures. Tracing the life of the Uganda Cancer Institute through historical periods of independence, dictatorship, war, structural adjustment, and the HIV pandemic, this powerful book reveals the challenges and opportunities of Africanizing oncology. This is a landmark study on the history—and future—of global oncology.”
— Carlo Caduff, author of The Pandemic Perhaps: Dramatic Events in a Public Culture of Danger