Pease Porridge in a Pot: The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa

Pease porridge hot, pease porridge coldPease porridge in the pot nine days oldSome like it hot, some like it coldBut none like it in the pot nine days old.The recent flurry of monographs and collections relating to the social aspects of medicine and disease in Africa and elsewhere ensures that collections of essays on this topic will receive much attention and will be concomitantly influential. Under the circumstances it is particularly regretable that the volume under review has been published so many years after most of the essays in it were written, precluding their referring to the many recent advances in the field. Of the 21 articles and introductory essays in Steven Feierman and John Janzen, eds., The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), six (amounting to 24% of the text) are reprints, seven (35%) are revisions whose originals date from 1979 and 1981, and eight (41%) are originals. Of these latter, two chapters date from 1983, and two of the reprints have been supplanted by book-length monographs. One must therefore ask of the editors, the press, and the Joint Committee on African Studies of the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council whether such unusually delayed publication is justified.