This book examines the knowledge and therapeutic use of opium and various species of poppy by physicians in ninth-century Baghdad (the leading medical centre then) as seen in key works by six outstanding physicians, with reference to others. The study opens with a brief look at early Islamic knowledge of the Graeco-Roman use of opium, while examining in detail entries on opium and poppy in the Arabic version of Dioscorides's influential and fundamental Materia medica. The core of the study aims to establish to what extent and how opium and poppy are used in the selected books of the six...

This volume uniquely looks into the practice of medical care in the medieval world, particularly amongst the Jewish communities of Egypt. It examines the medicinal prescriptions, lists of materia medica and letters between physicians, pharmacists and patients found in the Cairo Genizah. Most histories of medieval medicine of the eastern Mediterranean are based upon theoretical Arabic writings. Here the authors examine, analyze and contextualize these medieval prescriptions also from the perspective of ethnobotanists, and as a result, provide an innovative insight into the everyday...

This is the first detailed analysis of an immensely popular 13th c. Arabic guide for pharmacists, from a time in which Jewish physicians and pharmacists worked alongside Muslim and Christian practioners. Minhāj al-dukkān ("How to manage a pharmacy"), by Abū ʾl-Munā al-Kūhīn al-ʿAṭṭār (fl. 1260) is the first attempt to explore the full spectrum of pharmacy in the medieval Arabic world: identification of the materia medica and methods of preparation; pharmacy's place within the sciences and particularly its relationship with...

In the early 14th century, a court nutritionist called Hu Sihui wrote his Yinshan Zhengyao, a dietary and nutritional manual for the Chinese Mongol Empire. Hu Sihui, a man apparently with a Turkic linguistic background, included recipes, descriptions of food items, and dietary medical lore including selections from ancient texts, and thus reveals to us the full extent of an amazing cross-cultural dietary; here recipes can be found from as far as Arabia, Iran, India and elsewhere, next to those of course from Mongolia and China. Although the medical theories are largely Chinese, they...

Transforming the Void: Embryological Discourse and Reproductive Imagery in East Asian Religions considers paths to self-cultivation and salvation that are patterned on human embryological development or procreative imagery in the religions of China and Japan. Focusing on Taoism, Esoteric Buddhism, Shinto, Shugendō, and local religious traditions, the contributors to the volume provide new insight into how the body's generative processes are harnessed as powerful metaphors for spiritual attainment. This volume offers an in-depth examination of the religious dimensions of embryology...

In The Indian System of Human Marks, Zysk offers a literary history of the Indian system of knowledge, which details divination by means of the marks on the bodies of both men and women. In addition to a historical analysis, the work includes texts and translations of the earliest treatises in Sanskrit. This is followed by a detailed philological analysis of the texts and annotations to the translations. The history follows the Indian system's evolution from its roots in ancient Mesopotamian collections of omen on the human body to modern-day practice in Rajasthan in the north and...

Sinologists; historians of Chinese medicine; physicians/practitioners/lay persons interested in traditional Chinese medicine; anthropologists; ethnologists

In Naturopathy in South India - Clinics between Professionalization and Empowerment, Eva Jansen offers a rich ethnographic account of current naturopathic thinking and practices, and examines its complex history, multiple interpretations, and antagonisms. This book presents two major forms of Naturopathy in contemporary South India: On one side, a scientific, professional branch models themselves after allopathic practitioners. On the other side, a group of ideologists uses an approach to patient treatment that is grounded in the principles of simplicity, transparency, a critique of...

Housni Alkhateeb Shehada's Mamluks and Animals: Veterinary Medicine in Medieval Islam is the first comprehensive study of veterinary medicine, its practitioners and its patients in the medieval Islamic world, with special emphasis on the Mamluk period (1250-1517). Based on a large variety of sources, it is a history of a scientific field that is also examined from social and cultural perspectives. Horses, as well as birds of prey used for hawking and falconry, were at the centre of the veterinary literature of that period, but the treatment and cure of other animals was not totally...

Based on several research seminars, the authors in this volume provide fresh perspectives of the intellectual and cultural history of East Asian medicine, 1550-1800. They use new sources, make new connections, and re-examine old assumptions, thereby interrogating whether and why European medical modernity is an appropriate standard for delineating the modern fate of East Asia's medical classics. The unique importance of early modern Europe in the history of modern medicine should not be used to gloss over the equally unique and thus different developments in East Asia. Each paper offers an...