Alternative Medicine?: A History - Hardcover

Bivins, Roberta

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199218870 ISBN 13: 9780199218875

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2008

Synopsis

Walk into your local health food shop or pick up the local paper, and youll see ads for meditation, acupuncture, herbal supplements, Tai Chi classes, homeopaths, faith healers, and Chinese herbalists. But what exactly is alternative medicine? Is the astonishing popularity of alternative and multicultural medicine really such a recent development?
Comparing the medical systems of China, India, and the west (both mainstream and alternative), this volume ranges across four centuries and many 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. Historian Roberta Bivens 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. Through comparisons of different medical innovations and importations across different cultures, the book illuminates the twin processes of medical and historical change as seen through the eyes of the medical professionals and consumers of the day. It traces for example the responses in nineteenth-century India to two western alternative medicines (homeopathy and mesmerism) and one staple of mainstream western medicine (germ theory).
Given the success of modern biomedical science, why are alternative and traditional treatments now so fashionable? This fascinating volume sheds light on this trend as it offers a sweeping comparative account of alternative medicine over four hundred years.

About this title

About the Author:

Roberta Bivins is Wellcome Lecturer in the History of Medicine at Cardiff University. Born in Massachusetts, she spent much of her childhood in Nigeria and has first-hand experience with non-orthodox medical practice in the Third World.

Review:

"This well written and painstakingly researched book would enhance any history of medicine collection."--Doody's
"This well written and painstakingly researched book would enhance any history of medicine collection."--Doody's
"Recommended."--Choice
"This well written and painstakingly researched book would enhance any history of medicine collection."--Doody's

"Recommended."--Choice

"Alternative Medicine? A History is an excellent achievement and appears on the scene precisely in an epoch when a plethora of misinformation exists regarding the origin and application of a diverse array of alternative and complementary medical healing systems...It will be of great value to both conventional and alternative health practitioners alike in helping to explain the differences, as well as the similarities, between diverse healing modalities practiced around the world today."--HerbalGram

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "A brilliant foil to the privileging of Western medicineEL this is cross-cultural history at its best - lively, acute, richly informative, and wonderfully revealing."--Roger Cooter, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "Extremely engaging... an imaginative, elegantly written and well constructed account, combining accessibility with good scholarship in the best possible way"--Carsten Timmermann, University of Manchester

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "Ground breaking... Roberta Bivins demonstrates the complex routes that medical knowledge and practice travelled, east to west, north to south, and back again... and disrupts our contemporary notions of "alternative" medicine."--Allan M. Brandt, author of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "I recommend this book to anyone with more than a passing interest in 'alternative' medicine."--Edzard Ernst, author of The Desktop Guide to Complementary and Alternative Medicine

UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "Roberta Bivins does a much-needed service to history and medicine by demonstrating that 'alternative medicine' is nothing new, but is as old as the first globalizing exchanges between Europe and Asia in the seventee

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0199218870
• ISBN 13: 9780199218875
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 258