Book of Healing

The first book-length study of Yordb¦ therapeutics, encompassing thousands of remedies for more than 160 different ailments, ¦wÉ ¦wps+n (Book of Healing) was originally published in 1910 by ¦jẹ`bT healer, politician, and public intellectual Joseph Oddmasd. 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, Oddmasd's is one of the most extensive and encyclopedic. While the existence of Oddmasd's massive work is well-known in southwestern Nigeria, it has not previously been available in English. Michael Ọl¦dẹ`jọ Afọl¦yan and Helen Tilley have translated the volume in its entirety, and here use it as an entrÉe into greater understandings of Yordb¦ medicine, spirituality, and print culture during a time of rapid change under British colonialism and the spread of Christianity.