Pharmacy in Senegal Gender, Healing, and Entrepreneurship [Paperback]

Pharmacy in Senegal explores the rise and expansion of pharmacies in Senegal in the 20th century. In Senegal, as in many African nations, the pharmacy is often the center of biomedical care, where pharmacists provide examinations and diagnoses and prescribe medicines. Donna A. Patterson notes that many pharmacists are women, which adds an important dimension to this story about medical training and the medical profession. In a health care landscape that includes traditional healers, herbalists, and Muslim healers, women pharmacists have become a mainstay of the local standard of care. Patterson provides a greater understanding of the role pharmacists play in bringing health care to the people they serve.

Cutting across the endless association of Africa with pandemic and global intervention, Donna A. Patterson offers a compelling account of robust, home-grown health professions that shows that the continent is firmly a part of the international medical industrial complex. What is more, women have played a major role in this development. This timely book has a great deal to teach us-not least, about innovative approaches to extending care and securing community health.

Donna A. Patterson is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Frances Biomedical Expansion: Creating African Medical Personnel
2. Practicing Pharmacy
3. Women Own Pharmacies Too: Financing Private Pharmacies
4. House and Street: Negotiating Professional and Private Lives
5. Pharmaceutical Trafficking in Colonial and Postcolonial Senegal
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Making and Unmaking Public Health in Africa: Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives edited by Ruth J. Prince and Rebecca Marsland (Ohio University Press, 2013). ISBN 9780821420584.

Suggests a new interpretation of the role of pharmacists where, far from being minor participants and supporting actors, they instead becomlc†