Confabulating with Dr Sloan Mahone

Associate Professor of the History of Medicine

Faculty of History | Centre for the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

Dr Mahone specializes 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). Her recent research has focussed on East Africa, particularly Kenya and Zanzibar. Her current project deals extensively with photography and visual sources, particularly related to neurology and psychiatry. She also teaches and supervises in the history of Global Psychiatry; the Psychology of Religion; and Gender and Sexuality.

Research Interests

History of Medicine and Psychiatry

History of Photography

Psychology of Religion

At present, She is 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. Her next project, now in the planning and preliminary field site investigation stage, is a comparative history of epilepsy and neurology across Africa.

She currently teaches:

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