Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1848 [Kindle Edition]
Author: Linda L. Barnes | Language: English | ISBN: B002R0DVKC | Format: PDF, EPUB
You can download Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1848 for everyone book 4shared, mediafire, hotfile, and mirror link
When did the West discover Chinese healing traditions? Most people might point to the "rediscovery" of Chinese acupuncture in the 1970s. In Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts, Linda Barnes leads us back, instead, to the thirteenth century to uncover the story of the West's earliest known encounters with Chinese understandings of illness and healing. As Westerners struggled to understand new peoples unfamiliar to them, how did they make sense of equally unfamiliar concepts and practices of healing? Barnes traces this story through the mid-nineteenth century, in both Europe and, eventually, the United States. She has unearthed numerous examples of Western missionaries, merchants, diplomats, and physicians in China, Europe, and America encountering and interpreting both Chinese people and their healing practices, and sometimes adopting their own versions of these practices.
A medical anthropologist with a degree in comparative religion, Barnes illuminates the way constructions of medicine, religion, race, and the body informed Westerners' understanding of the Chinese and their healing traditions.
- File Size: 4147 KB
- Print Length: 480 pages
- Publisher: Harvard University Press; 1 edition (December 15, 2005)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B002R0DVKC
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #710,340 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
This is a scholarly work, very organized and documented. It offers a unique perspective on the early period of Chinese and Western encounters with respect to the healing arts. It is not difficult reading, but because of the density of information it has taken me several weeks to work through it. I felt the journey was very worthwhile!!
The story is told primarily from historical documents ranging from 1245-1848, beginning with catholic priests and merchants traveling to China from Western Europe who recorded their encounters with the novel healing systems of China. These reports form a tapestry of topics and attitudes of the westerners which vary from respectful inquiry and awe to profoundly arrogant ignorance, narrow-mindedness, competitive propoganda, and perhaps intentional misrepresentation. The breadth of coverage is truly remarkable. This books provides a rare glimpse of Western European and early US medical history when the westerners were embracing an emerging concept of "real scientific methodology" with near religious fervor. The author carefully displays how the religious and intellectual needs of the west as it was moving through its own scientific infancy frequently resulted a display of intolerance toward others, including intolerance for Chinese concepts that 200 years later we would now say was clearly premature. More modern understandings of the nervous system, neural and fascial networks, neurotransmitters etc have opened plausible theories and mechanisms for some of the Chinese concepts (known by other names or metaphors). Another 200 years from now ... who knows what "obvious" truths and assumptions we will be retracting and how they will be judged through the mirror of historical research.
No comments:
Post a Comment