Download Free Knowledge And The Scholarly Medical Traditions Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Knowledge And The Scholarly Medical Traditions and write the review.

However much the three great traditions of medicine - Galenic, Chinese and Ayurvedic - differed from each other, they had one thing in common: scholarship. The foundational knowledge of each could only be acquired by careful study under teachers relying on ancient texts. Such medical knowledge is special, operating as it does in the realm of the most fundamental human experiences - health, disease, suffering, birth and death - and the credibility of healers is of crucial importance. Because of this, scholarly medical knowledge offers a rich field for the study of different cultural practices in the legitimation of knowledge generally. The contributors to this volume are all specialists in the history or anthropology of these traditions, and their essays range from historical investigations to studies of present-day practices.
How is medical knowledge made? New methods for research and clinical care have reshaped the practices of medical knowledge production over the last forty years. Consensus conferences, evidence-based medicine, translational medicine, and narrative medicine are among the most prominent new methods. Making Medical Knowledge explores their origins and aims, their epistemic strengths, and their epistemic weaknesses. Miriam Solomon argues that the familiar dichotomy between the art and the science of medicine is not adequate for understanding this plurality of methods. The book begins by tracing the development of medical consensus conferences, from their beginning at the United States' National Institutes of Health in 1977, to their widespread adoption in national and international contexts. It discusses consensus conferences as social epistemic institutions designed to embody democracy and achieve objectivity. Evidence-based medicine, which developed next, ranks expert consensus at the bottom of the evidence hierarchy, thus challenging the authority of consensus conferences. Evidence-based medicine has transformed both medical research and clinical medicine in many positive ways, but it has also been accused of creating an intellectual hegemony that has marginalized crucial stages of scientific research, particularly scientific discovery. Translational medicine is understood as a response to the shortfalls of both consensus conferences and evidence-based medicine. Narrative medicine is the most prominent recent development in the medical humanities. Its central claim is that attention to narrative is essential for patient care. Solomon argues that the differences between narrative medicine and the other methods have been exaggerated, and offers a pluralistic account of how the all the methods interact and sometimes conflict. The result is both practical and theoretical suggestions for how to improve medical knowledge and understand medical controversies.
Medical traditions encapsulate the knowledge of life, health, nutrition, diseases and their treatment patiently assembled by populations over a long period of time in the past, carefully handed down through generations, and subsequently recorded in writing and preserved in books now scattered in libraries across the world. Rarely the object of a specific study, they are approached here as a field in its own right. The present essay explores such key topics as the impact of tradition approach on medical historiography, the relation between written documents and practice, and the transmission of knowledge across time and cultures with its possible modifications and their processes and causes. Though based on a decade-long close scrutiny of the Greek medical tradition, it establishes parallels with other traditions, and invites not only to do comparative study, but also to apply to other traditions the approach proposed here. By laying down the foundations for a fresh analysis of ancient medical knowledge as a discipline, Medical Traditions - Exploring the Field will be a reference for any scholar interested in the medical record of the past, be it for the sake of history or for renewed applications in present day.
Healing Traditions offers a historical perspective to the interactions between South Africa's traditional healers and biomedical practitioners. It provides an understanding that is vital for the development of medical strategies to effectively deal with South Africa's healthcare challenges.
Western Europe supported a highly developed and diverse medical community in the late medieval and early Renaissance periods. In her absorbing history of this complex era in medicine, Siraisi explores the inner workings of the medical community and illustrates the connections of medicine to both natural philosophy and technical skills.
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.
This book brings together current critical research into medical pluralism during the last two centuries. It includes a rich selection of historical, anthropological and sociological case studies.
In this historical tour de force, Roy Porter takes a critical look at representations of the body in health, disease, and death in Britain from the mid-seventeenth to the twentieth century. Porter argues that great symbolic weight was attached to contrasting conceptions of the healthy and diseased body and that such ideas were mapped onto antithetical notions of the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. With these images in mind, he explores aspects of being ill alongside the practice of medicine, paying special attention to self-presentations by physicians, surgeons, and quacks, and to changes in practitioners’ public identities over time. Porter also examines the wider symbolic meanings of disease and doctoring and the “body politic.” Porter’s book is packed with outrageous and amusing anecdotes portraying diseased bodies and medical practitioners alike.
New Horizons in Medical Anthropology is a festschrift in honor of Charles Leslie whose influential career helped shape this subfield of anthropology. This collection of cutting-edge essays explores medical innovation and medical pluralism at the turn of the 21st century. The book accomplishes two things: it reflects recent research by medical anthropologists working in Asia who have been inspired by Charles Leslie's writing on such topics as medical pluralism and the early emergence of what has become a globalized biomedicine, the social relations of therapy management, and the relationship between the politics of the state and discourse about the health of populations, illness, and medicine. The book also takes up lesser known aspects of Leslie's work: his contribution as an editor and the role he played in carrying the field forward; his ethics as a medical anthropologist committed to humanism and sensitive to racism and eugenics; and the passion he inspired in his co-workers and students. Charles Leslie is a remarkable and influential social scientist. New Horizons in Medical Anthropology is a fitting tribute to a sensitive scholar whose theories and codes of practice provide an essential guide to future generations of medical anthropologists.
Organized around issues, debates and discussions concerning the various ways in which the concept of nature has been used, this book looks at how the term has been endlessly deconstructed and reclaimed, as reflected in anthropological, scientific, and similar writing over the last several decades. Made up of ten of Roy Ellen’s finest articles, this book looks back at his ideas about nature and includes a new introduction that contextualizes the arguments and takes them forward. Many of the chapters focus on research the author has conducted amongst the Nuaulu people of eastern Indonesia.