Author: Charles Leslie
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass
Year: 1998
Language: English
Pages: 419
ISBN/UPC (if available): 812081536X
Description
Asian Medical Systems provide fascinating opportunities to observe directly practices that continue ancient scientific modes of thought, and to analyse the historical processes that meditate their relationship to modern science and technology. Three great traditions of medical science evolved during antiquity in the Chinese, Indian, and Mediterranean civilizations, all based on humoral conceptions of health and illness.
Folk curers throughout the world continue to practice humoral medicine, but in Asia along educated physicians maintain its learned traditions. Thus, in these societies the great and little traditions of humoral medicine coexist with cosmopolitan medicine, which draws upon modern science and modes of professional organization.
This volume has been designed to show how research on Asian medicine opens a new field of scholarship, the comparative study of medical systems. Such a book requires the skills of authors with many kinds of training, and those who have contributed essays to this volume are trained in history, sociology, anthropology, public health, pharmacology, epidemiology, cosmopolitan medicine, and philosophy.
Contents
LIST OF TABLES
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
Charles Leslie
PART I
The Great Traditions of Hindu, Arabic, and Chinese Medicine
PART II
The Structure and Character of Cosmopolitan Medicine
PART III
The Adaptive Significance of Medical Traditions
PART IV
The Culture of Plural Medical Systems
PART V
The Ecology of Indigenous and Cosmopolitan Medical Practice
PART VI
Medical Revivalism
PART VII
Perspectives