Book of Healing

The first book-length study of YorUbA therapeutics, encompassing thousands of remedies for more than 160 different ailments, IwE IwOsAn (Book of Healing) was originally published in 1910 by Ij??bU healer, politician, and public intellectual Joseph OdUmOsU. Much of the scholarship on African healing cultures has been reconstructed from oral sources and texts produced by missionaries, colonial officials, and anthropologists. Of the handful of firsthand accounts from across all of sub-Saharan Africa that have survived in written form, OdUmOsU's is one of the most extensive and encyclopedic.

While the existence of OdUmOsU's massive work is well-known in southwestern Nigeria, it has not previously been available in English. Michael ?lAd??j? Af?lAyan and Helen Tilley have translated the volume in its entirety, and here use it as an entrEe into greater understandings of YorUbA medicine, spirituality, and print culture during a time of rapid change under British colonialism and the spread of Christianity.