Research into 'colonial' or 'imperial' medicine has made considerable progress in recent years, whilst the study of what is usually referred to as 'indigenous' or 'folk' medicine in colonized societies has received much less attention. This book redresses the balance by bringing together current critical research into medical pluralism during the last two centuries. It includes a rich selection of historical, anthropological and sociological case-studies that cover many different parts of the globe, ranging from New Zealand to Africa, China, South Asia, Europe and the USA.

A medical sociologist with a historian's obsession with detail and documentation, Poonam Bala tenaciously follows the developmental trajectory of medical pluralism in India with a keen eye to the dynamic social production of health and healing systems as social systems, practices, and technologies of power. Covering a broad swathe of history, this book explores how a turbulently emerging Indian State with shifting alliances and evolving rules ideologies (with the accompanying emergence of class and caste identities and opportunities) gave rise to a particular growth of scientific and, specifically, medical traditions in India. As a set of healing practices, a literary art, and a cultural knowledge base, India's medical traditions represent 'an acculturated product' of competing ideologies and the expression of contested State, and social and religious policies over time. Bala focuses on the power of State intervention and multiple levels of patronage to shape medical practice and theory, and in turn, India's very history.

Medical systems function in specific cultural contexts. It is common to speak of the medicine of China, Japan, India, and other nation-states. Yet almost all formalized medical systems claim universal applicability and, thus, are ready to cross the cultural boundaries that contain them. There is a critical tension, in theory and practice, in the ways regional medical systems are conceptualized as "nationalistic" or inherently transnational. This volume is concerned with questions and problems created by the friction between nationalism and transnationalism at a time when globalization has greatly complicated the notion of cultural, political, and economic boundedness. Offering a range of perspectives, the contributors address questions such as: How do states concern themselves with the modernization of "traditional" medicine? How does the global hegemony of science enable the nationalist articulation of alternative medicine? How do global discourses of science and "new age" spirituality facilitate the transnationalization of "Asian" medicine? As more and more Asian medical practices cross boundaries into Western culture through the popularity of yoga and herbalism, and as Western medicine finds its way east, these systems of meaning become inextricably interrelated. These essays consider the larger implications of transmissions between cultures.

This book examines genealogies of contagion in between contagion as microbe and contagion as affect. It analyzes how and why hygiene became authoritative and succeeded in becoming a part of the broader social and cultural vocabulary within the colonialist, anti-colonial, as well as modernist discourses.

The popularity of Tibetan medicine plays a central role in the international market for alternative medicine and has been increasing and extending far beyond its original cultural area becoming a global phenomenon. This book analyses Tibetan medicine in the 21st century by considering the contemporary reasons that have led to its diversity and by bringing out the common orientations of this medical system. Using case studies that examine of the social, political and identity dynamics of Tibetan medicine in Nepal, India, the PRC, Mongolia, the UK and the US, the contributors to this book answer the following three, fundamental questions: What are the modalities and issues involved in the social and therapeutic transformations of Tibetan medicine? How are national policies and health reforms connected to the processes of contemporary redefinition of this medicine? How does Tibetan medicine fit into the present, globalized context of the medical world? Written by experts in the field from the US, France, Canada, China and the UK this book will be invaluable to students and scholars interested in contemporary medicine, Tibetan studies, health studies and the anthropology of Asia. 'Winner of the ICAS Colleagues Choice Award 2009"

The Healing Tradition argues that Western medicine is fundamentally flawed because it fails to provide a healing environment for both individuals and society, and indicates potential ways to correct this through an integration model of medical humanities. All health professionals and those with an interest in medical humanities will find this book valuable reading.

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.