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This book will explore the childbirth process through globally diverse perspectives in order to offer a broader context with which to think about birth. We will address multiple rituals and management models surrounding the labor and birth process from communities across the globe. Labor and birth are biocultural events that are managed in countless ways. We are particularly interested in the notion of power. Who controls the pregnancy and the birth? Is it the hospital, the doctor, or the in-laws, and in which cultures does the mother have the control? These decisions, regarding place of birth, position, who receives the baby and even how the mother may or may not behave during the actual de...
In The Movement for Global Mental Health: Critical Views from South and Southeast Asia, prominent anthropologists, public health physicians, and psychiatrists respond sympathetically but critically to the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH). They question some of its fundamental assumptions: the idea that mental disorders can clearly be identified; that they are primarily of biological origin; that the world is currently facing an epidemic of them; that the most appropriate treatments for them normally involve psycho-pharmaceutical drugs; and that local or indigenous therapies are of little interest or importance for treating them. The contributors argue that, on the contrary, defining mental disorders is difficult and culturally variable; that social and biographical factors are often important causes of them; that the epidemic of mental disorders may be an effect of new ways of measuring them; and that the countries of South and Southeast Asia have abundant, though non-psychiatric, resources for dealing with them. In short, they advocate a thoroughgoing mental health pluralism.
Unani Medicine in the Making examines the institutions and practices of Unani medicine, the Graeco-Islamic healing practice based on the humoral theory attributed to Hippocrates and officially recognized as a system of medicine in India. Drawing on diverse materials, including Urdu sources, interviews with practitioners, and observations in clinics, the book explores what Unani medicine is today by attending to its multiplicity, scrutinizing apparent tensions between the understanding of Unani as a system of medicine and its multiple enactments as Islamic medicine, medical science, or alternative medicine. Ethnographic details provide vivid descriptions of the current practice of Unani in India, and invite readers to rethink the idea that humoral medicine is incommensurable with modern medicine and science, and that the modernization of Asian medicines invariably leads to their biomedicalization. Ultimately, the book also discusses the relationship of Unani with Muslim communities, examining the growing practice of Prophetic Medicine in Urban India and increasing representations of Unani as Islamic Medicine.
Like many of the traditional medicines of South Asia, Ayurvedic practice transformed dramatically in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With Doctoring Tradition, Projit Bihari Mukharji offers a close look at that recasting, upending the widely held yet little-examined belief that it was the result of the introduction of Western anatomical knowledge and cadaveric dissection. Rather, Mukharji reveals, what instigated those changes were a number of small technologies that were introduced in the period by Ayurvedic physicians, men who were simultaneously Victorian gentlemen and members of a particular Bengali caste. The introduction of these devices, including thermometers, watc...
Introducing materiality into the study of the history of medicine, this volume hones in on communities across the Indian Ocean World and explores how they understood and engaged with health and medical commodities. Opening up spatial dimensions and challenging existing approaches to knowledge, power and the market, it defines 'therapeutic commodity' and explores how different materials were understood and engaged with in various settings and for a number of purposes. Offering new spatial realms within which the circulation of commodities created new regimes of meaning, Histories of Health and Materiality in the Indian Ocean World demonstrates how medicinal substances have had immediate and far-reaching economic and political consequences in various capacities. From midwifery and umbilical cords, to the social spaces of soap, perfumes in early modern India and remedies for leprosy, this volume considers a vast range of material culture in medicinal settings to better understand the history of medicine and its role in global connections since the early 17th century.
On a weaver community of Bārā Banki District, Uttar Pradesh, India.
Seminar papers presented at a special panel in 61st session of Indian History Congress held at Kolkata, 1-3 Jan. 2001.
Bulletin is the official publication of the American Association for the History of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine. Each issue spans the social and scientific aspects of the history of medicine worldwide and includes reviews of recent books on medical history and information about national and international activities in the field.