New Book Series: Global Histories of Premodern Health and Healing (Edinburgh University Press)

Global History Lab, 2017

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Historical Archaeology

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2007

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Renaissance Quarterly, 2022

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2023

This Element first discusses the creation of transmitted medical canons that are generally dated from early imperial times through to the medieval era and then, by way of contrast, provides translations and analyses of non-transmitted texts from the pre-imperial late Shang and Zhou eras and the early imperial Qin and Han eras, as well as a brief discussion covering the period through the eleventh-century CE. The Element focuses on the evolution of concepts, categories of illness, and diagnostic and treatment methodologies evident in the newly discovered material and reveals a side of medical practice not reflected in the canons. It is both traditions of healing – the canons and the currents of local practice revealed by these texts – that influenced the development of East Asian medicine more broadly. The local practices show there was no real evolution from magical to non-magical medicine. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

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Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2016

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Medical history, 2018

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2019

From the colonial era until the HIV and Ebola epidemics of today, Africa has often been perceived as a ‘diseased continent’ – as a continent whose population and development has suffered greatly from a particularly heavy disease burden. In this course, which aims to introduce students to the social and cultural history of medicine in Africa from a global perspective, we will trace the origins and the impact of this perception. We will explore how both Africans and foreign actors in Africa dealt with disease and ill-health from precolonial times into the postcolonial era. We will look at African health concepts and healing systems and analyse how Africans dealt with western biomedical concepts and practices introduced and often violently imposed by colonial and missionary doctors, experts in tropical medicine and international organizations such as the WHO. These interactions were shaped by manifold forms of resistance and led to different forms of accomodation, hybridization and medical pluralism. We will also analyse the global dimensions of health and healing in Africa, by exploring not only how biomedical knowledge and practices circulated between empires and continents, but also how African healing ‘traditions’ and drugs travelled across oceans.

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Journal for the History of Knowledge, 2023

Time was a problem in medieval South Asia. It was – among other things – a medical problem that philosophers and physicians set out to solve. The complexities of medical practice – which entailed considering an almost infinite set of variables and combinations – meant that no normal person could possibly derive the principles of medicine in a single lifetime. There was too much to know and too little time. This meant that medical practitioners had to rely on the words of other people to carry out their cures. Practicing medicine depended on trusting the proper authorities. This article follows the arguments of two philosophers employed in royal courts in the 9th century – Jayanta Bhaṭṭa and Ugrāditya – who constructed arguments about how to relate to the textualized past of medicine in Sanskrit. Both scholars accepted that the temporalities of knowledge necessitated that medicine was originally propounded by an omniscient individual. But they disagreed on who counted as an authority and on the value of the Sanskrit medical classics. The article uses these scholars to show the temporalities of medicine in pre-colonial South Asia as multiple, shifting and contested. Moving beyond binaries of historical and mythic time in colonial and pre-colonial South Asia, this article attends to the work of medieval scholars to explicate the multiple rhythms of time that existed side-by-side prior to the epistemic violence of colonialism and the rise of modern Ayurveda.

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