Asian Medical Systems: A Comparative Study

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Asian Medical System provide fascinating opportunities to observe directly practices opportunities to observe directly practices that continue ancient scientific modes of thought, and to analyse the historical processes that mediate their relationship to modern science and technology. Three great tradition 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 kind 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.

About The Author:

CHARLES LESLIE is Professor Emeritus at the University of Delaware, where he headed the Center for Science and Culture. He is best known as pioneer in the field of Medical Anthropology from the University of Chicago, with a specialization on Mesoamerica. While working in the Mexican Indian communities, he became interested in traditional medicine. He eventually found himself drawn to the Asian medical system, in particular Ayurveda, on which he was written books and articles that hav provided the foundation for an entire field of anthropological study. He recently co-edited Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge (University of California Press), a collection of essay that develop the seminal ideas in his Asian Medical System.

List of Tables, ix
List of illustrations, xi
List of Contribution, xii
Foreword, xv