Title: Huang Di nei jing su wen: nature, knowledge, imagery in an ancient Chinese medical text, with an appendix, The doctrine of the five periods and six qi in the Huang Di nei jing su wen
Author: Unschuld, Paul U. (Paul Ulrich) 1943-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | Medical Anthropology | China | History of Medicine
Publisher's Description: The Huang Di nei jing su wen, known familiarly as the Su wen, is a seminal text of ancient Chinese medicine, yet until now there has been no comprehensive, detailed analysis of its development and contents. At last Paul U. Unschuld offers entry into this still-vital artifact of China's cultural and intellectual past. Unschuld traces the history of the Su wen to its origins in the final centuries B.C.E., when numerous authors wrote short medical essays to explain the foundations of human health and illness on the basis of the newly developed vessel theory. He examines the meaning of the title and the way the work has been received throughout Chinese medical history, both before and after the eleventh century when the text as it is known today emerged. Unschuld's survey of the contents includes illuminating discussions of the yin-yang and five-agents doctrines, the perception of the human body and its organs, qi and blood, pathogenic agents, concepts of disease and diagnosis, and a variety of therapies, including the new technique of acupuncture. An extensive appendix, furthermore, offers a detailed introduction to the complicated climatological theories of Wu yun liu qi ("five periods and six qi"), which were added to the Su wen by Wang Bing in the Tang era. In an epilogue, Unschuld writes about the break with tradition and innovative style of thought represented by the Su wen. For the first time, health care took the form of "medicine," in that it focused on environmental conditions, climatic agents, and behavior as causal in the emergence of disease and on the importance of natural laws in explaining illness. Unschuld points out that much of what we surmise about the human organism is simply a projection, reflecting dominant values and social goals, and he constructs a hypothesis to explain the formation and acceptance of basic notions of health and disease in a given society. Reading the Su wen, he says, not only offers a better understanding of the roots of Chinese medicine as an integrated aspect of Chinese civilization; it also provides a much needed starting point for discussions of the differences and parallels between European and Chinese ways of dealing with illness and the risk of early death.   [brief]
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Title: Colonizing the body: state medicine and epidemic disease in nineteenth-century India
Author: Arnold, David 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Asian Studies | South Asia | Asian History | Medicine | History
Publisher's Description: In this innovative analysis of medicine and disease in colonial India, David Arnold explores the vital role of the state in medical and public health activities, arguing that Western medicine became a critical battleground between the colonized and the colonizers.Focusing on three major epidemic diseases - smallpox, cholera, and plague - Arnold analyzes the impact of medical interventionism. He demonstrates that Western medicine as practiced in India was not simply transferred from West to East, but was also fashioned in response to local needs and Indian conditions.By emphasizing this colonial dimension of medicine, Arnold highlights the centrality of the body to political authority in British India and shows how medicine both influenced and articulated the intrinsic contradictions of colonial rule.   [brief]
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Title: A Chinese bestiary: strange creatures from the guideways through mountains and seas = [Shan hai jing]
Author: Strassberg, Richard E
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Art | Asian Literature | China | Folklore and Mythology | Asian History
Publisher's Description: A Chinese Bestiary presents a fascinating pageant of mythical creatures from a unique and enduring cosmography written in ancient China. The Guideways through Mountains and Seas, compiled between the fourth and first centuries b.c.e., contains descriptions of hundreds of fantastic denizens of mountains, rivers, islands, and seas, along with minerals, flora, and medicine. The text also represents a wide range of beliefs held by the ancient Chinese. Richard Strassberg brings the Guideways to life for modern readers by weaving together translations from the work itself with information from other texts and recent archaeological finds to create a lavishly illustrated guide to the imaginative world of early China. Unlike the bestiaries of the late medieval period in Europe, the Guideways was not interpreted allegorically; the strange creatures described in it were regarded as actual entities found throughout the landscape. The work was originally used as a sacred geography, as a guidebook for travelers, and as a book of omens. Today, it is regarded as the richest repository of ancient Chinese mythology and shamanistic wisdom. The Guideways may have been illustrated from the start, but the earliest surviving illustrations are woodblock engravings from a rare 1597 edition. Seventy-six of those plates are reproduced here for the first time, and they provide a fine example of the Chinese engraver's art during the late Ming dynasty. This beautiful volume, compiled by a well-known specialist in the field, provides a fascinating window on the thoughts and beliefs of an ancient people, and will delight specialists and general readers alike.   [brief]
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Title: A flourishing Yin: gender in China's medical history, 960-1665
Author: Furth, Charlotte
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: History | Asian History | Asian Studies | Women's Studies | China | Medicine
Publisher's Description: This book brings the study of gender to Chinese medicine and in so doing contextualizes Chinese medicine in history. It examines the rich but neglected tradition of fuke , or medicine for women, over the seven hundred years between the Song and the end of the Ming dynasty. Using medical classics, popular handbooks, case histories, and belles lettres , it explores evolving understandings of fertility and menstruation, gestation and childbirth, sexuality, and gynecological disorders.Furth locates medical practice in the home, where knowledge was not the monopoly of the learned physician and male doctors had to negotiate the class and gender boundaries of everyday life. Women as healers and as patients both participated in the dominant medical culture and sheltered a female sphere of expertise centered on, but not limited to, gestation and birth. Ultimately, her analysis of the relationship of language, text, and practice reaches beyond her immediate subject to address theoretical problems that arise when we look at the epistemological foundations of our knowledge of the body and its history.   [brief]
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Title: The blood of strangers: stories from emergency medicine
Author: Huyler, Frank 1964-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Medicine | American Literature | Autobiography
Publisher's Description: Reminiscent of Chekhov's stories, The Blood of Strangers is a visceral portrayal of a physician's encounters with the highly charged world of an emergency room. In this collection of spare and elegant stories, Dr. Frank Huyler reveals a side of medicine where small moments - the intricacy of suturing a facial wound, the bath a patient receives from her husband and daughter - interweave with the lives and deaths of the desperately sick and injured. The author presents an array of fascinating characters, both patients and doctors - a neurosurgeon who practices witchcraft, a trauma surgeon who unexpectedly commits suicide, a wounded murderer, a man chased across the New Mexico desert by a heat-seeking missile. At times surreal, at times lyrical, at times brutal and terrifying, The Blood of Strangers is a literary work that emerges from one of the most dramatic specialties of modern medicine. This deeply affecting first book has been described by one early reader as "the best doctor collection I have seen since William Carlos Williams's The Doctor Stories ."   [brief]
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Title: Paths to Asian medical knowledge
Author: Leslie, Charles M 1923-
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Asian Studies
Publisher's Description: Like its classic predecessor, Asian Medical Systems , Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge significantly expands the study of Asian medicine. These essays ask how patients and practitioners know what they know - what evidence of disease or health they consider convincing and what cultural traditions and symbols guide their thinking. Whether discussing Japanese anatomy texts, Islamic humoralism, Ayurvedic clinical practice, or a variety of other subjects, the authors offer an exciting range of information and suggest new theoretical avenues for medical anthropology.   [brief]
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Title: Contemplating the ancients: aesthetic and social issues in early Chinese portraiture 
Author: Spiro, Audrey
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Art | Architecture | China
Publisher's Description: Drawing on a wide variety of contemporaneous sources from Chinese history, literature, religious writings, and art and literary criticism, Spiro provides the modern reader with an aesthetic and social context for understanding early Chinese portraiture. Contemplating the Ancients introduces portraits that were never intended to be physical likenesses of their subjects and illuminates the meaning they held for the viewers for whom they were made.Spiro focusses on fourth- and fifth-century sets of almost identi- cal portraits of individuals known collectively in Chinese history as the Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove. Unlike the earlier Han dynasty portraits whose messages were universal, these exemplary portraits addressed a specific elitist audience. The subjects of these portraits served as idealized representations for a largely nouvel-arrivé aristocracy.Spiro examines the complex and sometimes ironic changes that occur when historical individuals are transformed by tradition into classical exemplars. She shows how the visual arts translate ideals of personal character into stylistic cues and how these cues, in turn, affect the values and behavior of human beings.   [brief]
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Title: Life without disease: the pursuit of medical utopia 
Author: Schwartz, William B 1922-
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Science | Medicine | Economics and Business | History and Philosophy of Science | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: The chaotic state of today's health care is the result of an explosion of effective medical technologies. Rising costs will continue to trouble U.S. health care in the coming decades, but new molecular strategies may eventually contain costs. As life expectancy is dramatically extended by molecular medicine, a growing population of the aged will bring new problems. In the next fifty years genetic intervention will shift the focus of medicine in the United States from repairing the ravages of disease to preventing the onset of disease. Understanding the role of genes in human health, says Dr. William B. Schwartz, is the driving force that will change the direction of medical care, and the age-old dream of life without disease may come close to realization by the middle of the next century. Medical care in 2050 will be vastly more effective, Schwartz maintains, and it may also be less expensive than the resource-intensive procedures such as coronary bypass surgery that medicine relies on today.Schwartz's alluring prospect of a medical utopia raises urgent questions, however. What are the scientific and public policy obstacles that must be overcome if such a goal is to become a reality? Restrictions on access imposed by managed care plans, the corporatization of charitable health care institutions, the increasing numbers of citizens without health insurance, the problems with malpractice insurance, and the threatened Medicare bankruptcy - all are the legacy of medicine's great progress in mastering the human body and society's inability to assimilate that mastery into existing economic, ethical, and legal structures. And if the average American life span is 130 years, a genuine possibility by 2050, what social and economic problems will result?Schwartz examines the forces that have brought us to the current health care state and shows how those same forces will exert themselves in the decades ahead. Focusing on the inextricable link between scientific progress and health policy, he encourages a careful examination of these two forces in order to determine the kind of medical utopia that awaits us. The decisions we make will affect not only our own care, but also the system of care we bequeath to our children.   [brief]
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Title: Understanding heart disease 
Author: Selzer, Arthur
Published: University of California Press,  1992
Subjects: Medicine | Science
Publisher's Description: Diseases of the heart are the leading cause of death in the Western world. Health professionals and the general public alike eagerly watch advances in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of heart disease. Yet the more spectacular aspects of medical progress in the field are often reported prematurely and their potential benefits exaggerated.Written in clear, accessible language, this book presents an authoritative and balanced picture of how heart diseases are recognized and managed. From his many years of experience, Dr. Selzer believes a well-informed patient can cooperate more successfully with a physician, and his book includes information vital to anyone confronting heart problems and cardiac emergencies.   [brief]
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Title: From the fat of our souls: social change, political process, and medical pluralism in Bolivia
Author: Crandon-Malamud, Libbet
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Latin American Studies | Politics | Medical Anthropology | Medicine
Publisher's Description: From the Fat of Our Souls offers a revealing new perspective on medicine, and the reasons for choosing or combining indigenous and cosmopolitan medical systems, in the Andean highlands. Closely observing the dialogue that surrounds medicine and medical care among Indians and Mestizos, Catholics and Protestants, peasants and professionals in the rural town of Kachitu, Libbet Crandon-Malamud finds that medical choice is based not on medical efficacy but on political concerns. Through the primary resource of medicine, people have access to secondary resources, the principal one being social mobility. This investigation of medical pluralism is also a history of class formation and the fluidity of both medical theory and social identity in highland Bolivia, and it is told through the often heartrending, often hilarious stories of the people who live there.   [brief]
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Title: Holy women of the Syrian Orient
Author: Brock, Sebastian P
Published: University of California Press,  1987
Subjects: Religion | Classical Religions | Religion
Publisher's Description: The fifteen hagiographies about holy women of the Syrian Orient collected here include stories of martyrs' passions and saints' lives, pious romances and personal reminiscences. Dating from the fourth to seventh centuries A.D., they are translated from Syriac into accessible and vivid prose. Annotations and source notes by the translators help clarify elements that may be unfamiliar to some readers. This collection bears witness to the profound contributions women made to early Chistianity: their various roles, their leadership inside and outside the church structure, and their power to influence others. A new preface discusses recent developments in the field and updates the bibliography.   [brief]
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Title: Whitman and the romance of medicine
Author: Davis, Robert Leigh 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: American Studies | American Literature | Gender Studies
Publisher's Description: In this compelling, accessible examination of one of America's greatest cultural and literary figures, Robert Leigh Davis details the literary and social significance of Walt Whitman's career as a nurse during the American Civil War. Davis shows how the concept of "convalescence" in nineteenth-century medicine and philosophy - along with Whitman's personal war experiences - provide a crucial point of convergence for Whitman's work as a gay and democratic writer.In his analysis of Whitman's writings during this period - Drum-Taps, Democratic Vistas, Memoranda During the War , along with journalistic works and correspondence - Davis argues against the standard interpretation that Whitman's earliest work was his best. He finds instead that Whitman's hospital writings are his most persuasive account of the democratic experience. Deeply moved by the courage and dignity of common soldiers, Whitman came to identify the Civil War hospitals with the very essence of American democratic life, and his writing during this period includes some of his most urgent reflections on suffering, sympathy, violence, and love. Davis concludes this study with an essay on the contemporary medical writer Richard Selzer, who develops the implications of Whitman's ideas into a new theory of medical narrative.   [brief]
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Title: Writing at the margin: discourse between anthropology and medicine
Author: Kleinman, Arthur
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Anthropology | Medical Anthropology | Sociology | Medicine | Asian Studies | Social Problems
Publisher's Description: One of the most influential and creative scholars in medical anthropology takes stock of his recent intellectual odysseys in this collection of essays. Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist who has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America since 1968, draws upon his bicultural, multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies for thinking about how, in the postmodern world, the social and medical relate. Writing at the Margin explores the border between medical and social problems, the boundary between health and social change. Kleinman studies the body as the mediator between individual and collective experience, finding that many health problems - for example the trauma of violence or depression in the course of chronic pain - are less individual medical problems than interpersonal experiences of social suffering. He argues for an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, one that embraces the infrapolitical context of illness, the responses to it, the social institutions relating to it, and the way it is configured in medical ethics.Previously published in various journals, these essays have been revised, updated, and brought together with an introduction, an essay on violence and the politics of post-traumatic stress disorder, and a new chapter that examines the contemporary ethnographic literature of medical anthropology.   [brief]
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Title: American medicine: the quest for competence
Author: Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Medicine | Science | Medical Anthropology | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: What does it mean to be a good doctor in America today? How do such challenges as new biotechnologies, the threat of malpractice suits, and proposed health-care reform affect physicians' ability to provide quality care?These and many other crucial questions are examined in this book, the first to fully explore the meaning and politics of competence in modern American medicine. Based on Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good's recent ethnographic studies of three distinct medical communities - physicians in rural California, academics and students involved in Harvard Medical School's innovative "New Pathway" curriculum, and oncologists working on breast cancer treatment - the book demonstrates the centrality of the issue of competence throughout the medical world. Competence, it shows, provides the framework for discussing the power struggles between rural general practitioners and specialists, organizational changes in medical education, and the clinical narratives of high-technology oncologists. In their own words, practitioners, students, and academics describe what competence means to them and reveal their frustration with medical-legal institutions, malpractice, and the limitations of peer review and medical training.Timely and provocative, this study is essential reading for medical professionals, academics, anthropologists, and sociologists, as well as health-care policymakers.   [brief]
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Title: Plato's Parmenides
Author: Plato
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Classics | Philosophy | Classical Philosophy
Publisher's Description: Of all Plato's dialogues, the Parmenides is notoriously the most difficult to interpret. Scholars of all periods have disagreed about its aims and subject matter. The interpretations have ranged from reading the dialogue as an introduction to the whole of Platonic metaphysics to seeing it as a collection of sophisticated tricks, or even as an elaborate joke. This work presents an illuminating new translation of the dialogue together with an extensive introduction and running commentary, giving a unified explanation of the Parmenides and integrating it firmly within the context of Plato's metaphysics and methodology. Scolnicov shows that in the Parmenides Plato addresses the most serious challenge to his own philosophy: the monism of Parmenides and the Eleatics. In addition to providing a serious rebuttal to Parmenides, Plato here re-formulates his own theory of forms and participation, arguments that are central to the whole of Platonic thought, and provides these concepts with a rigorous logical and philosophical foundation. In Scolnicov's analysis, the Parmenides emerges as an extension of ideas from Plato's middle dialogues and as an opening to the later dialogues. Scolnicov's analysis is crisp and lucid, offering a persuasive approach to a complicated dialogue. This translation follows the Greek closely, and the commentary affords the Greekless reader a clear understanding of how Scolnicov's interpretation emerges from the text. This volume will provide a valuable introduction and framework for understanding a dialogue that continues to generate lively discussion today.   [brief]
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Title: Jews, medicine, and medieval society Joseph Shatzmiller
Author: Shatzmiller, Joseph
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Jewish Studies | Medieval History | European History | Medieval Studies | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Jews were excluded from most professions in medieval, predominantly Christian Europe. Bigotry was widespread, yet Jews were accepted as doctors and surgeons, administering not only to other Jews but to Christians as well. Why did medieval Christians suspend their fear and suspicion of the Jews, allowing them to inspect their bodies, and even, at times, to determine their survival? What was the nature of the doctor-patient relationship? Did the law protect Jewish doctors in disputes over care and treatment?Joseph Shatzmiller explores these and other intriguing questions in the first full social history of the medieval Jewish doctor. Based on extensive archival research in Provence, Spain, and Italy, and a deep reading of the widely scattered literature, Shatzmiller examines the social and economic forces that allowed Jewish medical professionals to survive and thrive in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Europe. His insights will prove fascinating to scholars and students of Judaica, medieval history, and the history of medicine.   [brief]
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Title: The corporate practice of medicine: competition and innovation in health care
Author: Robinson, James C 1953-
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: Politics | Public Policy | Medicine | Economics and Business
Publisher's Description: One of the country's leading health economists presents a provocative analysis of the transformation of American medicine from a system of professional dominance to an industry under corporate control. James Robinson examines the economic and political forces that have eroded the traditional medical system of solo practice and fee-for-service insurance, hindered governmental regulation, and invited the market competition and organizational innovations that now are under way. The trend toward health care corporatization is irreversible, he says, and it parallels analogous trends toward privatization in the world economy.The physician is the key figure in health care, and how physicians are organized is central to the health care system, says Robinson. He focuses on four forms of physician organization to illustrate how external pressures have led to health care innovations: multispecialty medical groups, Independent Practice Associations (IPAs), physician practice management firms, and physician-hospital organizations. These physician organizations have evolved in the past two decades by adopting from the larger corporate sector similar forms of ownership, governance, finance, compensation, and marketing.In applying economic principles to the maelstrom of health care, Robinson highlights the similarities between competition and consolidation in medicine and in other sectors of the economy. He points to hidden costs in fee-for-service medicine - overtreatment, rampant inflation, uncritical professional dominance regarding treatment decisions - factors often overlooked when newer organizational models are criticized.Not everyone will share Robinson's appreciation for market competition and corporate organization in American health care, but he challenges those who would return to the inefficient and inequitable era of medicine from which we've just emerged. Forcefully written and thoroughly documented, The Corporate Practice of Medicine presents a thoughtful - and optimistic - view of a future health care system, one in which physician entrepreneurship is a dynamic component.   [brief]
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Title: Galileo on the world systems: a new abridged translation and guide
Author: Galilei, Galileo 1564-1642
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Cinema and Performance Arts | History and Philosophy of Science | History
Publisher's Description: Galileo's 1632 book, Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican , comes alive for twentieth-century readers thanks to Maurice Finocchiaro's brilliant new translation and presentation. Condemned by the Inquisition for its heretical proposition that the earth revolves around the sun, Galileo's masterpiece takes the form of a debate, divided into four "days," among three highly articulate gentlemen.Finocchiaro sets the stage with his introduction, which not only provides the human and historical framework for the Dialogue but also admits the reader gracefully into the basic non-Copernican understanding of the universe that would have been shared by Galileo's original audience. The translation of the Dialogue is abridged in order to highlight its essential content, and Finocchiaro gives titles to the various parts of the debate as a guide to the principal topics. By explicating his own critical reading of this text that is itself an exercise in critical reasoning on a gripping real-life controversy, he illuminates those universal, perennial activities of the human mind that make Galileo's book a living document. This is a concrete, hands-on introduction to critical thinking. The translation has been made from the Italian text provided in volume 7 of the Critical National Edition of Galileo's complete works edited by Antonio Favaro. The translator has also consulted the 1632 edition, as well as the other previous English translations, including California's 1967 version . Galileo on the World Systems is a remarkably nuanced interpretation of a classic work and will give readers the tools to understand and evaluate for themselves one of the most influential scientific books in Western civilization.   [brief]
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Title: Evolution of sickness and healing 
Author: Fabrega, Horacio
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Medicine | Medical Anthropology
Publisher's Description: Evolution of Sickness and Healing is a theoretical work on the grand scale, an original synthesis of many disciplines in social studies of medicine. Looking at human sickness and healing through the lens of evolutionary theory, Horacio Fàbrega, Jr. presents not only the vulnerability to disease and injury but also the need to show and communicate sickness and to seek and provide healing as innate biological traits grounded in evolution. This linking of sickness and healing, as inseparable facets of a unique human adaptation developed during the evolution of the hominid line, offers a new vantage point from which to examine the institution of medicine.To show how this complex, integrated adaptation for sickness and healing lies at the root of medicine, and how it is expressed culturally in relation to the changing historical contingencies of human societies, Fàbrega traces the characteristics of sickness and healing through the early and later stages of social evolution. Besides offering a new conceptual structure and a methodology for analyzing medicine in evolutionary terms, he shows the relevance of this approach and its implications for the social sciences and for medical policy. Health scientists and medical practitioners, along with medical historians, economists, anthropologists, and sociologists, now have the opportunity to consider every essential aspect of medicine within an integrated framework.   [brief]
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Title: Taming the wind of desire: psychology, medicine, and aesthetics in Malay shamanistic performance
Author: Laderman, Carol
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: Anthropology | Asian Studies | Medical Anthropology | Psychology | Southeast Asia | Medicine
Publisher's Description: Charged with restoring harmony and relieving pain, the Malay shaman places his patients in trance and encourages them to express their talents, drives, personality traits - the "Inner Winds" of Malay medical lore - in a kind of performance. These healing ceremonies, formerly viewed by Western anthropologists as exotic curiosities, actually reveal complex multicultural origins and a unique indigenous medical tradition whose psychological content is remarkably relevant to contemporary Western concerns.Accepted as apprentice to a Malay shaman, Carol Laderman learned and recorded every aspect of the healing seance and found it comparable in many ways to the traditional dramas of Southeast Asia and of other cultures such as ancient Greece, Japan, and India. The Malay seance is a total performance, complete with audience, stage, props, plot, music, and dance. The players include the patient along with the shaman and his troupe. At the center of the drama are pivotal relationships - among people, between humans and spirits, and within the self. The best of the Malay shamans are superb poets, dramatists, and performers as well as effective healers of body and soul.   [brief]
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