Book of Healing

The first book-length study of YorÙbÁ therapeutics, encompassing thousands of remedies for more than 160 different ailments, ÌwÉ ÌwÒsÀn (Book of Healing) was originally published in 1910 by Ìjẹ̀bÚ healer, politician, and public intellectual Joseph OdÙmÓsÙ. 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, OdÙmÓsÙ’s is one of the most extensive and encyclopedic.

While the existence of OdÙmÓsÙ’s massive work is well-known in southwestern Nigeria, it has not previously been available in English. Michael ỌlÁdẹ̀jọ AfọlÁyan and Helen Tilley have translated the volume in its entirety, and here use it as an entrÉe into greater understandings of YorÙbÁ medicine, spirituality, and print culture during a time of rapid change under British colonialism and the spread of Christianity.