Professor Sloan Mahone
Professor of the History of Medicine and Global Health
Faculty of History | Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
Research Interests
- History of Medicine and Psychiatry
- History of Photography
- Psychology of Religion
At present, I am completing a project on the history of psychiatry and photography in late colonial Kenya. The monograph looks at the turmoil of 1950s Kenya as told through a unique photographic collection taken by a Canadian psychiatrist who ran the mental hospital in Nairobi during the Mau Mau war. This is an unusual approach to a history of psychiatry – opting to follow the trail of a physician photographer as he encountered healers, prophets, patients, and prisoners during the most tumultuous period in Kenya’s modern history. This project has become as much a history of photography as a history of medicine with the use, re-use and misuse of the images themselves an integral part of the story. My next project, now in the planning and preliminary field site investigation stage, is a comparative history of epilepsy and neurology across Africa.
Publications
Psychiatry and Empire
Psychiatry and Empire brings together scholars in the History of Medicine to explore questions of race, gender and power relations in former colonial states across Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific. Focusing on the intellectual histories of concepts of mental illness, mental healing and strategies of coping and resistance, this volume advances our understanding of the rise of modern psychiatry as it collided with, and sometimes underpinned, the psychology of colonial rule.
DPhil Students
I would like to hear from potential DPhil students regarding history of medicine in Africa, global history of psychiatry, photography and medicine, gender and sexuality.
I would like to hear from potential Masters students regarding global history of medicine, history of medicine in Africa, global history.