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Focusing on practice more than theory, this collection offers new perspectives for studying the so-called "humoral medical traditions," as they have flourished around the globe during the last 2,000 years. Exploring notions of "balance" in medical cultures across Eurasia, Africa and the Americas, from antiquity to the present, the volume revisits "harmony" and "holism" as main characteristics of those traditions. It foregrounds a dynamic notion of balance and asks how balance is defined or conceptualized, by whom, for whom and in what circumstances. Balance need not connoteegalitarianism or equilibrium. Rather, it alludes to morals of self care exercised in place of excessiveness and indulgences after long periods of a life in dearth. As the moral becomes visceral, the question arises: what constitutes the visceral in a body that is in constant flux and flow? How far, and in what ways, are there fundamental properties or constituents in those bodies?
List of contents
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgements
List of Contributors
Introduction Peregrine Horden Part I: A Body of What? Chapter 1. Female Fluids in the Hippocratic Corpus: How Solid was the Humoral Body?
Helen King Chapter 2. Fluxes and Stagnations: A Physician's Perception and Treatment of Humours in Baroque Ladies
Barbara Duden Chapter 3. When Money became a Humour
Shigehisa Kuriyama Part II: A Practice with What? Chapter 4. Were the Four Humours Fundamental to Medieval Islamic Medical Practice?
Emilie Savage-Smith Chapter 5. Complexio and experimentum: Tensions in Late Medieval Medical Practice
Peter Jones Chapter 6. Foundationalism and Instrumentality: Rethinking Humoral Paradigms in Early Twentieth-Century Yunani tibb in India
Guy Attewell Chapter 7. Hot Cold Classifications and Balancing Actions in Mesoamerican Diet and Health: Theory and Ethnography of Practice in Twentieth-Century Mexico
Ellen Messer Part III: A Balance of What? Chapter 8. Balancing Diversity and Well-Being: Words, Concepts and Practice in Eastern Africa
David Parkin Chapter 9. 'Holism' and the Medicalization of Emotion: The Case of Anger in Chinese Medicine
Elisabeth Hsu Chapter 10. Aiming for Congruence: The Golden Rule of Ayurveda
Francis Zimmermann Chapter 11. Harmony or Hierarchy? The Mindful Body and the Sacred Landscape in Tibetan Healing Practices
Patrizia Bassini Part IV: What Next? Chapter 12. What Next? Balance in Medical Practice and the Medico-Moral Nexus of Moderation
Elisabeth Hsu Index
About the author
Peregrine Horden is Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and an Extraordinary Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is co-author of The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (with Nicholas Purcell, Blackwell, 2000) and author of Hospitals and Healing from Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages (Ashgate, 2008). He is also writing a general book on early hospitals for Yale University Press.
Elisabeth Hsu is Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Oxford, and Governing Body Fellow of Green Templeton College. Recent co-edited volumes include Wind, Life, Health (with Chris Low, Blackwell, 2008) and Plants, Health and Healing: On the Interface of Ethnobotany and Medical Anthropology (with Stephen Harris, Berghahn Books, 2010). Her most recent authored book is Pulse Diagnosis in Early Chinese Medicine: The Telling Touch (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Summary
Offers new perspectives for studying the so-called "humoral medical traditions" over the last 2,000 years Re-visits "harmony" and "holism" as main characteristics of these traditions Asks how "balance" is defined, by whom, for whom, and in what circumstances
