Download e-book for kindle: Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, by Matthew M. Heaton

Black epidermis, White Coats is a background of psychiatry in Nigeria from the Nineteen Fifties to the Nineteen Eighties. operating within the contexts of decolonization and anticolonial nationalism, Nigerian psychiatrists sought to interchange racist colonial psychiatric theories in regards to the mental inferiority of Africans with a common and egalitarian version targeting vast mental similarities throughout cultural and racial limitations. specific emphasis is put on Dr. T. Adeoye Lambo, the 1st indigenous Nigerian to earn a distinctiveness measure in psychiatry within the uk in 1954. Lambo lower back to Nigeria to develop into the scientific superintendent of the newly based Aro psychological health center in Abeokuta, Nigeria’s first  “modern” psychological health facility. At Aro, Lambo started to revolutionize psychiatric learn and scientific perform in Nigeria, operating to integrate  “modern” western scientific concept and applied sciences with “traditional” cultural understandings of psychological disease. Lambo’s learn concerned about deracializing psychiatric pondering and redefining psychological sickness when it comes to a version of common human similarities that crossed racial and cultural divides.

Black epidermis, White Coats is the 1st paintings to concentration totally on black Africans as manufacturers of psychiatric wisdom and as definers of psychological affliction of their personal correct. by means of interpreting the ways in which Nigerian psychiatrists labored to combine their psychiatric education with their indigenous backgrounds and cultural and civic nationalisms, Black pores and skin, White Coats presents a foil to Frantz Fanon’s extensively publicized reactionary articulations of the connection among colonialism and psychiatry. Black epidermis, White Coats can also be at the innovative of histories of psychiatry which are more and more drawing connections among neighborhood and nationwide advancements in late-colonial and postcolonial settings and foreign medical networks. Heaton argues that Nigerian psychiatrists have been in detail conscious of the necessity to have interaction in overseas discourses as half and parcel of the transformation of psychiatry at home.