In tracing the trajectory of medical treatment during the American revolutionary war and discussing the specifics of each war front, Howard interrogated the several health challenges that plagued the war camps, describing adequately the treatment and surgical methods adopted by the American and British medical departments during the war and the impact of diseases on the native Americans and the black populace, including the unwavering efforts to curb the spread of smallpox and digging out the strategies adopted to curb Covid-19. This most recent pandemic has posed a great challenge to America and the global health system. Thus, this, coupled with the several unique graphical representations of the battlefield activities, a skillful pattern of chapter introduction with a monograph or line of thought creates in the readers the desire to take their minds on a voyage of feasting on every page of this book.

This essay argues that the conventional framing of the colonial medical encounter in Ibadan, as a competition between two systems that traditional medicine partially lost, misdescribes what occurred. Colonial healthcare provision did not simply compete with indigenous practice. It reclassified it. By deciding which practices would be counted, licensed, taught and recorded as medicine, the colonial administration and the Christian missions redistributed authority among indigenous practitioners, and they did so unevenly.

Imperial Bedlam is strategically written to analyze a cross-cultural debate over the conception of madness in colonial western Nigeria. Reviewing this piece after two decades not only provides a medium for renewing a discourse for recent and essential inquiry in Nigeria healthcare but also because the book remains relevant and significant to understanding the history of mental illness in Nigeria and the impact of colonialism on mental illness, which is a contemporary matter of concern in a world enamored by the consequence of poverty, compromised education, gender inequality, ill-health, violence, and other global challenges.