Includes bibliographical references and index.

PART I: THE POLITICS OF SICKNESS AND HEALTH -- Female genital mut ilation: contesting the right to speak of women's bodies in Africa and the West / Nahid Toubia -- Albanian masculinities, sex-work and m igration: homosexuality, AIDS and other moral threats / Nicola Mai - - The semantics and politics of childbearing and motherhood in conte mporary African literature / Nana Wilson-Tagoe -- What difference did empire make? Sex, gender and sanitary reform in the British Empire / Philippa Levine -- Dangerous blood: mensturation, medicine and myth in early modern England / Margaret Healy -- PART II: THE RE PRESENTATION OF SICKNESS AND HEALTH -- Remembrance of health lost: d is/figuring Africa in European AIDS writing / James N. Agar -- Vu lnerable margins: the iconography of blood, dirt and disease in the ear ly twentieth-century South African settler novel / Lynda Morgan -- Sex in a hot climate: moral degeneracy and erotic excess in The sto ry of Jan Daraa / Rachel Harrison -- Some fundamental riddles of cholera: sex, sodomy and representations of the fundament / George S . Rousseau -- Behold the (sick) man / Michael Worton -- PART I II: LEARNING FROM SICKNESS AND HEALTH -- Infectious social change: t uberculosis and exile among Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala / Audrey Prost -- Angry women and the evolution of Chinese medicine / Shig ehisa Kuriyama -- Reading gender in ancient Egyptian healing Papyri / Stephen Quirke -- Renâe and the 'Mal du Siáecle': a literary ro le model for the negotiation of problematic sexual identity in nineteen th-century Europe - the case of Custine and Amiel / Caroline Warman -- Poetry, pictures and the sexual demographics of health / Debor ah Kirklin.