Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions

by Don Bates

Overview

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. The ways in which practitioners used these texts varied among historical periods and cultures, providing a rich field for the study of different cultural practices in the legitimation of knowledge. The essays in this volume, contributed by specialists in the history and anthropology of these traditions, range from historical investigations to studies of present-day practices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521499750
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/02/1995
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 8.98(h) x 0.91(d)

Table of Contents

List of illustrations; List of contributors; Acknowledgements; 1. Scholarly ways of knowing: an introduction Don Bates; Part I. Scholarly Medicine in the West: 2. Epistemological arguments in early Greek medicine in comparativist perspective G. E. R. Lloyd; 3. Autopsia, historia and what women know: the authority of women in Hippocratic gynaecology Lesley Dean-Jones; 4. The growth of medical empiricism Robert James Hankinson; 5. Scholarship and social context: a medical case from the eleventh-century Near East Lawrence I. Conrad; 6. The experience of the book: manuscripts, texts, and the role of epistemology in early medieval medicine Faith Wallis; 7. Artifex factivus sanitatis: health and medical care in medieval Latin Galenism Luis García-Ballester; 8. Epistemology and learned medicine in early modern England Andrew Wear; Part II. Chinese Traditional Medicine: 9. Text and experience in classical Chinese medicine Nathan Sivin; 10. Visual knowledge in classical Chinese medicine Shigehisa Kuriyama; 11. A deathly disorder: understanding women's health in late imperial China Francesca Bray; 12. Re-writing traditional medicine in post-Maoist China Judith Farquhar; Part III. Ayurvedic Medicine: 13. Writing the body and ruling the land: Western reflections on Chinese and Indian medicine Margaret Trawick; 14. The scholar, the wise man, and universals: three aspects of Ayurvedic medicine Francis Zimmerman; 15. The epistemological carnival: meditations on disciplinary intentionality and Ayurveda Lawrence Cohen; Part IV. Commentaries: 16. Commentary Amos Funkenstein; 17. Commentary Allan Young; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...the book encloses rich lodes of scholarship which the explorer can mine with profit, receiving not only new information but flashes of new insight, according to his or her own background." Lester S. King, Journal of the History of Medicine

From the Publisher

Examines and compares the means by which healers in western Galenic, Chinese, and Indian Ayuvedic medical traditions claimed to know something about promoting health and healing. They share the characteristic of basing knowledge on the written word rather than revelation, trial and error, or even simple apprenticeship. The 15 essays, from the Epistemology and the Scholarly Medical Tradition workshop, include historical studies and descriptions of current practice. The date and place of the workshop are not noted. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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