There is considerable interest now in the contemporary lives of the so-called traditional medicines of South Asia and beyond. "Doctoring Traditions, "which examines Ayurveda in British India, particularly Bengal, roughly from the 1860s to the 1930s, is a welcome departure even within the available work in the area. For in it the author subtly interrogates the therapeutic changes that created modern Ayurveda. He does so by exploring how Ayurvedic ideas about the body changed dramatically in the modern period and by breaking with the oft-repeated but scantily examined belief that changes in Ayurvedic understandings of the body were due to the introduction of cadaveric dissections and Western anatomical knowledge. "Doctoring Traditions" argues that the actual motor of change were a number of small technologies that were absorbed into Ayurvedic practice at the time, including thermometers and microscopes. In each of its five core chapters the book details how the adoption of a small technology set in motion a dramatic refiguration of the body. This book will be required reading for historians both of medicine and South Asia.

"Patients and doctors alike are keenly aware that the medical world is in the midst of great change. We live in an era of continuous healthcare reforms, many of which focus on high volume, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. This compelling, thoughtful book is the response of a practicing physician who explains how population-based reforms are diminishing the relationship between doctor and patients, to the detriment of both. As an antidote to stubbornly held traditions, Dr. Abraham M. Nussbaum suggests ways that doctors and patients can learn what it means to be ill and to seek medical assistance. Drawing on personal stories, validated studies, and neglected history, the author develops a series of metaphors to explore a doctor's role in different healthcare reform scenarios: scientist, technician, author, gardener, teacher, servant, and witness. Each role shapes what physicians see when they encounter a patient. Dr. Nussbaum cautions that true healthcare reform can happen only when those who practice medicine can see, and be seen by, their patients as fellow creatures. His memoir makes a hopeful appeal for change, and his insights reveal the direction that change must take."--Jacket flap.

In the early 2000s, the central government of China encouraged all of the nation’s registered minorities to “salvage, sort, synthesize, and elevate” folk medical knowledges in an effort to create local health care systems comparable to the nationally supported institutions of traditional Chinese medicine. Gathering Medicines bears witness to this remarkable moment of knowledge development while sympathetically introducing the myriad therapeutic traditions of southern China. Over a period of six years, Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai worked with seven minority nationality groups in China’s southern mountains, observing how medicines were gathered and local healing systems codified. Gathering Medicines shares their intimate view of how people understand ethnicity, locality, the body, and nature. This ethnography of knowledge diversities in multiethnic China is a testament to the rural wisdom of mountain healers, one that theorizes, from the ground up, the dynamic encounters between formal statist knowledge and the popular authority of the wild.

In Healers in the Making, Kira Robison investigates medical instruction at the University of Bologna using the lens of practical medicine, examining both the formation of medical authority and innovations in practical medical pedagogy during the late medieval period.

Neither Donkey nor Horse tells the story of how Chinese medicine was transformed from the antithesis of modernity in the early twentieth century into a potent symbol of and vehicle for China’s exploration of its own modernity half a century later. Instead of viewing this transition as derivative of the political history of modern China, Sean Hsiang-lin Lei argues that China’s medical history had a life of its own, one that at times directly influenced the ideological struggle over the meaning of China’s modernity and the Chinese state. Far from being a remnant of China’s premodern past, Chinese medicine in the twentieth century coevolved with Western medicine and the Nationalist state, undergoing a profound transformation—institutionally, epistemologically, and materially—that resulted in the creation of a modern Chinese medicine. This new medicine was derided as “neither donkey nor horse” because it necessarily betrayed both of the parental traditions and therefore was doomed to fail. Yet this hybrid medicine survived, through self-innovation and negotiation, thus challenging the conception of modernity that rejected the possibility of productive crossbreeding between the modern and the traditional. By exploring the production of modern Chinese medicine and China’s modernity in tandem, Lei offers both a political history of medicine and a medical history of the Chinese state.

This book is a must for beginners and serious students of herbs and of Native American ways. This set of herbal teachings, which draws strongly from the Muscogee tradition, presents an understanding of the healing nature of plants for the first time in book form. In a time of expanding awareness of the potential of herbs, this work shines and beckons. Tis Mal examines common wild plants and in a clear and authoritative style explains how to identify, honor, select, and prepare them for use. Illustrated and indexed by plant name and medical topic.

A classic comparative study of medicine and national culture, Medicine and Culture shows us that while doctors regard themselves as servants of science, they are often prisoners of custom.