What Is Medicine?: Western and Eastern Approaches to Healing PDF

Rating: (3 reviews) Author: Paul U. Unschuld ISBN : 9780520257665 New from $21.30 Format: PDF

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What Is Medicine? Western and Eastern Approaches to Healing is the first comparative history of two millennia of Western and Chinese medicine from their beginnings in the centuries BCE through present advances in sciences like molecular biology and in Western adaptations of traditional Chinese medicine. In his revolutionary interpretation of the basic forces that undergird shifts in medical theory, Paul U. Unschuld relates the history of medicine in both Europe and China to changes in politics, economics, and other contextual factors. Drawing on his own extended research of Chinese primary sources as well as his and others' scholarship in European medical history, Unschuld argues against any claims of “truth” in former and current, Eastern and Western models of physiology and pathology. What Is Medicine? makes an eloquent and timely contribution to discussions on health care policies while illuminating the nature of cognitive dynamics in medicine, and it stimulates fresh debate on the essence and interpretation of reality in medicine's attempts to manage the human organism.

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• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (September 8, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520257669
• ISBN-13: 978-0520257665
• Product Dimensions: 0.6 x 5.8 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

What Is Medicine?: Western and Eastern Approaches to Healing PDF

This slim volume can be seen as a follow on from Dr. Paul Unschuld's book "Chinese Medicine: A History of Ideas" and is pitched more towards the lay reader. Instead of focusing purely on the development of Chinese medicine, Dr. Unschuld tries to draw a comparison between the development of Medicine in the West and the East along the lines of many of the macro history books comparing the development of Chinese and European civilizations.

This book revisits some of the themes in Chinese Medicine : A History of Ideas, arguing that Chinese medicine is not monolithic and there are many different paradigms may be active at a given time. For instance, Chinese medicine includes strains of daemonic medicine (illness caused by demons and spirits), folk medicine (partially based on herbalism), systemic correspondence (yin and yang, five elements)and from the 19th century heavily influenced by western science.

Indeed his main thesis, in this book, is that looking at the body "expresses" very little about causality of illness or health, just being something that excretes different kinds of fluids, is variously hot or cold, and takes in and expels air. In order to create a medicine, one has to have a working model with which to build a theory about how the body works. Unschuld's argument is that the difference in Eastern and Western medicine derives from different social-political models at the dawn of "medicine" around 200 BC and these models continue to influence the working model for medicine to the present day. Thus the polis in Greece served as a model for autonomous self sufficient bodies, paving the way for atomism and the reductionist model of Western medicine.

It appears to be the fate of books with demanding content that those who read quickly to come to snap judgments see things very differently than those who read more slowly, and pause and think and re-read more difficult passages to grasp a profound message fully. Paul Unschuld's most recent book, What is Medicine? provides one example. No doubt not all will understand it immediately and fully, but once again Unschuld has presented us with a most thought-provoking essay. If there were an alternative Nobel Prize in the philosophy of medicine, this book in fact would be a prime candidate. It offers an answer to the most essential question in the comparative historiography of healing and health care: what is medicine? What is its cultural message, apart from attempting to cure and prevent bodily and mental ills? Although the book is short, his answers have considerable substance. The book shows, among other things, that there is no medical conceptualization independent of the more encompassing existential fears and aspirations of a population, but those readers who do not wish to be bothered by such musings may instead look at the usual anecdotes presented by earlier historians of medicine along the lines of "who did what when first." For Unschuld by contrast, the issue is how did a new way of looking at things first emerge and why did it gain acceptance by a larger audience over time. It was never, this book convincingly suggests, the living or dead body that interested observers. The stimulus for radically new views of disease and health lay rather in the environment of the body as observed, and not in the body per se. This is not entirely a new idea; it has been suggested for selected episodes in the history of medicine before.