Alternative Medicine?

Alternative Medicine?: A History [Paperback]

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Alternative Medicine?: A History
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Hailed as "elegant and engaging" and "a fascinating journey from east to west and back again" (Financial Times), this fascinating volume offers a sweeping comparative account of alternative medicine over four hundred years. Comparing the medical systems of China, India, and the west (both mainstream and alternative), historian Roberta Bivins ranges across the centuries and the continents, mapping the transmission of medical expertise from one culture to another and laying bare the roots of today's distinctions between alternative, complementary, and orthodox medicine. Bivins uses a wealth of illuminating and entertaining historical examples-from horse-racing English earls to desperate missionaries in 17th-century Indonesia, and from hypnotism in the British Raj to homeopathy in the American Wild West-to underscore the vital point that the cross-cultural transmission of medical knowledge and expertise, even alternative medical knowledge and expertise, is not a uniquely contemporary phenomenon, but has a long and fascinating pedigree. Anyone interested in meditation, acupuncture, herbal supplements, T'ai Chi, and so on will find in this volume a wealth of fascinating information on alternative and traditional medicine.

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• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press; 1 edition (August 20, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199543763
• ISBN-13: 978-0199543762
• Product Dimensions: 0.5 x 4.9 x 7.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,251,855 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Alternative Medicine? A history, by Roberta Bivins, Oxford University Press, 2007, 258 ff.

The author of this book, on cultural cross-fertilization of medical knowledge over past centuries, particularly between East and West, is a lecturer in the History of Medicine at Cardiff University. Her primary focus here is on how medical investigative techniques practiced in the East came to be used in western medicine. The quite long Introduction (one-fifth of the book) discusses attitudes in the West to medical treatments of both East and West from medieval times on. The concept of a `vital force' found in techniques from ayurveda to homeopathy is explored.

The first chapter proper focuses on the use of moxabustion in the treatment of gout and then goes on to cover the use of meridians of `chi' (spiritual energy) in acupuncture. Chapter 2 is about mesmerism and homeopathy, both of nineteenth century European origin. Chapter 3 looks at the scientific study of acupuncture in Europe and homeopathy and compares the attitudes of eastern and western cultures to these techniques. Chapter 4 reverses the process and looks at how eastern countries viewed some western techniques, particularly homeopathy and mesmerism, at a time when western medicine was becoming increasingly materialistic and these techniques were far from being widely accepted even in Britain. Until the discovery of anaesthetics for surgery and Pasteur's discovery of germ theory to provide more effective treatment of infections, allopathy was far from being either widely respected or effective in the west.

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