ABSTRACT
This chapter offers the reader some general hypotheses about the process of professionalisation in African medicine to-day. Herbalism, in its present guise as empirical medicine, is a product of this shift, yet it necessarily retains too the symbolic and ritual overtones that add crucially to its potency as a traditional cure. For increasing numbers, then, traditional medicine was coming to be identified with herbalism. The politics of medicine require now a degree of professionalisation among healers of all kinds. Associations of traditional medicine in Africa thus bring to professionalisation a legacy wholly absent from the formal medical professions of most countries elsewhere. Despite the complexity of this legacy, and its very varied impact on different medical cultures across the continent, there emerges from the evidence presented in this volume a broad typology of professional associations today.
