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Author: Visit Amazon's Volker Scheid Page
ISBN : 0822328720
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Review
“Volker Scheid reveals the dynamic context of Chinese medicine and its continuous process of encounter, interpretation, negotiation, and synthesis. This study’s depth of detail and breathtaking interdisciplinary scope provide a multidimensional understanding of Chinese medicine and the forces that nourish, constrain, and transform it. Any serious scholar or practitioner will want to read and reread this groundbreaking volume.”—Ted J. Kaptchuk, author of The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine
“Volker Scheid’s book is a seriously original work. One of its great strengths is Scheid’s refusal to see Chinese medicine as either unitary or centred. He insists on its plurality, with incursions of Western biomedicine as just more elements within an already multiple field of medical practices. The other great strength is Scheid’s refusal to see medicine as static. He brings to the fore the creative interplay between Chinese and Western traditions, the dynamism that can emerge in the intersection of radically disparate techniques, remedies, and conceptual schemes. Along the way, Scheid develops a fascinating epistemology and ontology of agency, human and nonhuman, that makes sense of the plurality and syntheses that he confronts us with. This is a path-breaking book—one that could be a model for future work in the history of medicine and in cultural studies at large.”—Andrew Pickering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
From the Publisher
"Volker Scheid's book is a seriously original work. One of its great strengths is Scheid's refusal to see Chinese medicine as either unitary or centred. He insists on its plurality, with incursions of Western biomedicine as just more elements within an already multiple field of medical practices. The other great strength is Scheid's refusal to see medicine as static. He brings to the fore the creative interplay between Chinese and Western traditions, the dynamism that can emerge in the intersection of radically disparate techniques, remedies, and conceptual schemes. Along the way, Scheid develops a fascinating epistemology and ontology of agency, human and nonhuman, that makes sense of the plurality and syntheses that he confronts us with. This is a path-breaking book—one that could be a model for future work in the history of medicine and in cultural studies at large."—Andrew Pickering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
"Volker Scheid reveals the dynamic context of Chinese medicine and its continuous process of encounter, interpretation, negotiation, and synthesis. This study's depth of detail and breathtaking interdisciplinary scope provide a multidimensional understanding of Chinese medicine and the forces that nourish, constrain, and transform it. Any serious scholar or practitioner will want to read and reread this groundbreaking volume."—Ted J. Kaptchuk, author of The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine
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Books with free ebook downloads available Free Download Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis
- Series: Science and Cultural Theory
- Paperback: 432 pages
- Publisher: Duke University Press Books (June 12, 2002)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0822328720
- ISBN-13: 978-0822328728
- Product Dimensions: 1.1 x 6.3 x 9.1 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Free Download Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis
I have had the privilege of studying traditional Chinese medicine in Mainland China. It was interesting that many of the Western practitioners who were with me were scandalized by what they saw as the destruction of traditional medicine by contemporary Chinese doctors. If I can generalize, the Chinese are great pragmatists and for them their medicine - including acupuncture and herbalism - is in a constant state of growth and development. By contrast the Westerners thought that traditional Chinese medicine was an ancient system stuck in amber.
This book highlights all of these points and many others.
The author is a medical anthropologist as well as a practitioner of Chinese medicine who reads Chinese.
What he does is to weave together traditional anthropological concepts with Chinese philosophy, social psychology, science and technology to create a revealing tapestry. Although there is evidence that acupuncture has been in use for millennia, its current form is no more than fifty years old, and owes as much to politics as it does to tradition.
This is the way that Chinese medicine has adapted and synthesized new discoveries and new influences over the centuries. It is now quite normal to find traditional Chinese practitioners who use both traditional diagnosis using the pulse and the tongue, together with X-rays and blood work. A treatment may include not only acupuncture and herbs, but also some conventional Western medicine. This book highlights the ways in which Chinese medicine is not so much a thing as a dynamic process.
The author uses case studies from his own fieldwork in China to examine traditional medicine from a variety of perspectives.