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| Alternative Medicine? A History | Buy a book...
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| Author(s): | R. Bivins |
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press |
| ISBN: | 9780199218875 |
| Format: | hardback |
| 238pp | |
| Price: | £14.99 |
| Review Date: | 05 September 2007 |
| Review: | Roberta Bivins, having had spent her childhood in New England and Nigeria, has encountered different approaches to medicine. Here she follows the history of different medical innovations and importations through the years and across countries. She begins by comparing classical and modern western medicine, Ayurveda and Chinese medicine, and considering their interactions over the centuries. Going on to the seventeenth century, she looks at patient dissatisfaction with established medicine, and then, in the eighteenth century, the rising of homeopathy and mesmerism. By the nineteenth century acupuncture became one of the first surgical techniques to be tested by scientific experiment – and Bivins examines the attitudes towards homeopathy and acupuncture. The last chapter moves to look at the historical impact of cross-cultural medical exchanges in non-western contexts, looking at the continuities and distinctions of contemporary medical globalism. |