Product Description

Walk into your local health food shop or pick up the local paper, and youll see ads for meditation, acupuncture, herbal supplements, Tai Chi classes, homeopaths, faith healers, and Chinese herbalists. But what exactly is alternative medicine? Is the astonishing popularity of alternative and multicultural medicine really such a recent development?
Comparing the medical systems of China, India, and the west (both mainstream and alternative), this volume ranges across four centuries and many continents, mapping the transmission of medical expertise from one culture to another and laying bare the roots of today's distinctions between alternative, complementary, and orthodox medicine. Historian Roberta Bivens uses a wealth of illuminating and entertaining historical examples--from horse-racing English earls to desperate missionaries in 17th-century Indonesia, and from hypnotism in the British Raj to homeopathy in the American Wild West--to underscore the vital point that the cross-cultural transmission of medical knowledge and expertise, even alternative medical knowledge and expertise, is not a uniquely contemporary phenomenon, but has a long and fascinating pedigree. Through comparisons of different medical innovations and importations across different cultures, the book illuminates the twin processes of medical and historical change as seen through the eyes of the medical professionals and consumers of the day. It traces for example the responses in nineteenth-century India to two western alternative medicines (homeopathy and mesmerism) and one staple of mainstream western medicine (germ theory).
Given the success of modern biomedical science, why are alternative and traditional treatments now so fashionable? This fascinating volume sheds light on this trend as it offers a sweeping comparative account of alternative medicine over four hundred years.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #754401 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 264 pages

From Publishers Weekly
As a child, medical historian Bivins was treated by a healer in Nigeria and an M.D. in Boston; the experience left her convinced that, though effective, the Western model of medicine is "far from complete." Looking from Aristotle's day to the present, Bivins compiles a history of patient care as performed by the "rival systems" of traditional-cultural healing practices, more or less the global norm before the late 18th century, and the scientific orthodoxy that came to replace it in Europe and America. Looking at such examples as a West Indian herbal cure for gout that gained purchase in 18th century Europe, Bivins traces the infiltration of such ideas as acupuncture, mesmerism and homeopathy into the rapidly calcifying biomedical hegemony of the West, and the "'legitimate' medical offspring" they engendered. Bivins' research is thorough throughout-including a wide range of scientists, thinkers and spiritualists while shifting from Europe to India to the Far East and back-but so is her disdain for a system that posits "increasingly costly" and ever-narrowing options for both patients and practitioners. Her strident tone may not convince anyone not already on her side, but Bivins' history is a provocative, far-sighted take on a long-debated subject.
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Review

"This well written and painstakingly researched book would enhance any history of medicine collection."--Doody's
"Recommended."--Choice
"Alternative Medicine? A History is an excellent achievement and appears on the scene precisely in an epoch when a plethora of misinformation exists regarding the origin and application of a diverse array of alternative and complementary medical healing systems...It will be of great value to both conventional and alternative health practitioners alike in helping to explain the differences, as well as the similarities, between diverse healing modalities practiced around the world today."--HerbalGram
UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "A brilliant foil to the privileging of Western medicineEL this is cross-cultural history at its best - lively, acute, richly informative, and wonderfully revealing."--Roger Cooter, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, University College London
UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "Extremely engaging... an imaginative, elegantly written and well constructed account, combining accessibility with good scholarship in the best possible way"--Carsten Timmermann, University of Manchester
UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "Ground breaking... Roberta Bivins demonstrates the complex routes that medical knowledge and practice travelled, east to west, north to south, and back again... and disrupts our contemporary notions of "alternative" medicine."--Allan M. Brandt, author of The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product that Defined America
UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "I recommend this book to anyone with more than a passing interest in 'alternative' medicine."--Edzard Ernst, author of The Desktop Guide to Complementary and Alternative Medicine
UNEDITED UK REVIEW: "Roberta Bivins does a much-needed service to history and medicine by demonstrating that 'alternative medicine' is nothing new, but is as old as the first globalizing exchanges between Europe and Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Medicine has seldom been so powerfully presented in its diverse cultural and changing historical contexts. A fascinating and richly illuminating book."--David Arnold, University of Warwick
"This well written and painstakingly researched book would enhance any history of medicine collection."--Doody's
"In the same erudite style reminiscent of her late mentor, the great medical historian Roy Upton, Roberta Bivins both lucidly and entertainingly introduces the reader to the complexities of the principal traditional medical systems which are now becoming common in the so-called 'modern world....'

For such a concise book, it contains a wealth of information regarding the 'workings' [of] various healing systems, including Homeopathy, Ayurveda from India, as well as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), including acupuncture, moxibustion, and herbal therapies....

Alternative Medicine?: A History is an extraordinary achievement and appears on the scene precisely in an epoch in which a plethora of misinformation exists regarding the origin and application of a diverse array of alternative and complementary medical healing systems."--Armando Gonzalez-Stuart, PhD, University of Texas at El Paso and University of Texas at Austin Cooperative Pharmacy Program
"Recommended."--Choice
"...Roberta Bivins both lucidly and entertainingly introduces the reader to the complexities of the principal traditional medical systems that are now becoming common in the modern world.... For such a concise book, it contains a wealth of information regarding the workings of various healing systems... Alternative Medicine? A History is an excellent achievement..."--HerbalGram

About the Author

Roberta Bivins is Wellcome Lecturer in the History of Medicine at Cardiff University. Born in Massachusetts, she spent much of her childhood in Nigeria and has first-hand experience with non-orthodox medical practice in the Third World.

Customer Reviews

Regarding Homeopathy's Science-Ejected Vitalism, 2008:
This book is an excellent example of homeopathy's underpinning vitalism / animatism / animism / dualism 'purposeful life spirit' figmentation {like naturopathy, which educationally per AANMC schools and licensure-wise per NPLEX examination, requires 'such' full-blown classical Hahnemannian homeopathy woo [labeled as clinical science!!!]}.

I quote:

"Hahnemann [...] believed that disease sprang not from a simple breakdown in the bodily mechanism [p.089...but from] the body's ethereal vital force [...therefore,] treatments needed to act on the metaphysical, rather than the corporeal, level [...] he argued that within all living bodies resided an innate healing power [...] 'the spirit-like vital force (dynamis) animating the material human organization' [...aka] vis medicatrix naturae - the healing power of nature [p.090...] 'dynamis' or vital force [...his] medicines more powerfully engaged the patient's vital force [...] 'by giving a remedy which resembles the disease the instinctive vital force is compelled to increase its vital energy' [etc. p.091]."

-r.c.