Nancy Rose Hunt and Hubertus Büschel (eds.), <i>Psychiatric Contours: New African Histories of Madness</i> Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024. Pp. 360. ISBN 978-1-4780-3034-8. $29.95 (paperback).

In Psychiatric Contours, Nancy Rose Hunt and Hubertus Bschel present twelve contributions on the (post)colonial history of madness in Africa, divided into four parts: (auto)biographical writings on psychiatric illness, the history of specific diagnoses, colonial psychiatry's interest in the supernatural and neglected sources.All contributors have established themselves as experts in the history of medicine or psychiatry, which is particularly impressive in the case of Raphal Gallien, who was, at the time of the publication of this book, still a PhD student at Universit Paris Cit.Most of the chapters are nuanced case studies and micro-historical snapshots, focusing on a clearly defined set of cases or sources and carefully contextualized, with the few more 'zoomed-out' (p.160) exceptions -such as the medical historian Jonathan Sadowsky's excellent chapter on the widespread framing of depression as a 'Western culture-bound syndrome' (p.157) -allowing for a broader understanding of some of the questions the book as a whole raises.Some chapters are composed in an almost conversational style, which makes for a captivating read.All contributors try to highlight blanks in research and literature, and to point out alternatives to rigid binaries in our interpretations.In her introduction, Hunt, a historian and anthropologist of medicine, presents the book's two axes.On the one hand, there are three key concepts, which informed the composition of the volume's chapters (madness, psychopolitics and the vernacular) and on the other hand there is the need for new and experimental sources, interpretations and perspectives in psychiatric history.This includes the non-chronological mixing of chapters on colonial and postcolonial psychiatry -a justified critique in itself of the rigid break that decolonization often represents in research.The first part of the book consists of three chapters, each focusing on the case of one specific man, ranging from the late colonial period (1940s Tanganyika) to early postcolonial settings (1960s-1970s Ghana and 1960s Nigeria).In Chapter 1, the medical historian Nana Osei Quarshie presents the psychiatric-patient file and petition of a man, Akla-Osu, interned for 'schizophrenia', which he categorizes as one example of a vast 'archive of false prophets' (p.44).The provenance researcher Richard Hlzl presents, in Chapter 2, the case of an African priest, Father John, whose criticism of the Catholic Church was disregarded because of a potential diagnosis of hereditary syphilis, which allowed his superiors to dismiss him entirely as "'our problem priest" and "in fact a psychological case"' (p.83).In Chapter 3, the historian of psychiatry Bschel introduces the fascinating case of