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but not in their recovery rates. Having this information helps Rankin make a strong case that some naval physicians employed a form of racialized medicine on the ships when they treated Africans differently. Rankin is very interested in addressing the question of whether or not what he has described can be defined as “colonial medicine”—medicine that sought to reorganize subjects’ lives in a way that affirmed the colonizer’s superiority (5). Rankin argues that although British medicine was not superior or uniformly applied and accepted, British medical practitioners still viewed it as superior. Because of this, British medicine could be considered “colonial medicine” even though it did not in fact attain its goals. It is enlightening to see the evolution of British racial thought and medicine at a time when British medicine was not clearly better than African medicine. Rather than focusing on classifying it as colonial, however, Rankin might have emphasized more how the dynamics between European and African medicine at this time led to exchange and compromise. This would have strengthened his argument that his book adds to the work of scholars understanding empire as including “cultural sharing, melding, and interaction” rather than a unidirectional process of European domination (6). This relates to what historians of health and healing in Africa have been exploring more recently. See, for example, Karen E. Flint, Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948 (2008); Anne Digby,Diversity and Division in Medicine: Health Care in South Africa from the 1800s (2006); and David Baranov, The African Transformation of Western Medicine and the Dynamics of Global Cultural Exchange (2008). Rankin should have engaged these works (rather than some of the much older studies he cites) to bring them into dialogue with British studies. Rankin’s book is, however, an important addition to the history of health and healing in Africa, as well as to British studies, though for perhaps different reasons than intended.