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Faculty of History

University of Oxford

Dr Sloan Mahone

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Dr Sloan Mahone
Associate Professor of the History of Medicine
Faculty of History | Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
01865 (2)74602
sloan.mahone@history.ox.ac.uk

I specialize in the history of psychiatry and the psychological sciences in Africa. I have extensive experience in East, Southern and Central Africa, dating back to the Peace Corps in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire). My recent research has focussed on East Africa, particularly Kenya and Zanzibar. My current project deals extensively with photography and visual sources, particularly related to neurology and psychiatry. I also teach and supervise in the history of Global Psychiatry; the Psychology of Religion; and Gender and Sexuality. 

Oxford Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities

Featured Publication

Psychiatry and Empire (AIAA, January 2008).

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.

Research
  • 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

  • 'Hat on - hat off': trauma and trepanation in Kisii, western Kenya

    2014
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Journal of Eastern African Studies
    In 1957, Kenya's government psychiatrist and director of the colony's Mathari Mental Hospital travelled to western Kenya to investigate the practice of trepanation among the Gusii people in Kisii District. Applied to relieve pressure on the brain by scraping away a portion of the skull with a hooked knife, trepanation was exceptionally rare by the 20th century, but remained common in Kisii where the operations are conducted by a group of skilled practitioners. This article uses materials from psychiatrist Edward Margetts' personal papers, including photographs, diaries and clinical notes, to describe and examine the practice of trepanation in Kisii in the 1950s, concluding with a discussion of the social meaning of trepanation and trauma in modern Kenya. © 2014 © 2014 Taylor & Francis.
    Kenya, medicine, photography, psychiatry, trauma

  • Introduction

    2013
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Health in Africa

  • Psychiatry and Empire

    2007
    |
    Book
    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.

  • Psychiatry and the Practical Problems of Empire in East Africa

    2007
    |
    Chapter
    |
    Psychiatry and Empire
    H.L. Gordon first exercised his philosophical contemplation of the causes of African ‘backwardness’ from his farm in Kenya early in the 1920s. Gordon spent his days as a self-described medical farmer until his posting to Mathari Mental Hospital in Nairobi afforded him the opportunity to provide the Kenya government with the evidence to support his developing theories.1 In 1932, the British Medical Journal published a summary of Gordon’s work with pathologist, F.W. Vint that averred: ‘Dr. Gordon has found that a low degree of mentality is widely prevalent, constituting what in a European community would be a social danger.’2 The author, a colleague of Gordon’s, concluded that should such differences between the European and African mind be shown, efforts to educate the African to the standard of the European could prove to be either futile or disastrous. Kenya Colony provided an ideal environment for the application of medical science, particularly the psychological sciences, to the challenges of governance just as Gordon had hoped. With his help, the types of mental disorders found at Mathari were scrutinized for possible associations with the educability or, more specifically, the natural limits to the education of the African subject.

  • Psychiatry in the East African Colonies: A Background to Confinement

    2006
    |
    Journal article
    |
    International Review of Psychiatry
    This article is concerned with the discipline of psychiatry in colonial East Africa as it emerged out of the crime and disorder problem to become an intellectually significant ‘East African School’ of psychiatry. The process of lunacy certification, in particular, provides a snapshot of the medical and political tensions that existed among the medical establishment, the prison system and the colonial courts, all of whom sought to define collective African behaviour. This historical article utilises archaic terminology, such as ‘lunatic’ or ‘lunacy’, as these categories were in use at the time.

  • The Psychology of Rebellion: Colonial Medical Responses to Dissent in British East Africa

    2006
    |
    Journal article
    |
    Journal of African History
    This article opens with a retelling of colonial accounts of the ‘mania of 1911’, which took place in the Kamba region of Kenya Colony. The story of this ‘psychic epidemic’ and others like it would be recounted over the years as evidence depicting the predisposition of Africans to episodic mass hysteria. This use of medical and psychological language in primarily non-medical contexts serves to highlight the intellectual and political roles psychiatric ideas played in colonial governance. The salience of such ideas was often apparent in the face of increasing social tension, charismatic leadership and a proliferation of East African prophetic movements. This article addresses the attempts by the colonial authorities to understand or characterize, in psychological terms, a progression of African ‘rebellious types’ in society that often took the form of prophets and visionaries, but were diagnosed as epileptic, neurotic or suffering from ‘religious mania’.
    • More
Teaching

Current DPhil Students

  • Seyma Afacan
  • John Lidwell-Durnin
  • Daniel Ostendorff
  • Rhea Sookdeosingh

I would be willing to hear from potential DPhil students regarding history of medicine in Africa, global history of psychiatry, photography and medicine, gender and sexuality.

I would be willing to hear from potential Masters students regarding global history of medicine, history of medicine in Africa, global history.

I currently teach:

Masters:

  • Methods and Themes in the History of Medicine
  • Graduate Research Forum in History of Science, Medicine & Technology
  • Political Economy of Health and Medicine in Africa
  • Historical Approaches to the Psychology of Religion
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