Acupuncture, Expertise and Cross-Cultural Medicine

by R. Bivins

Overview

Alternative medicine is a fifty billion dollar per year industry. But is it all nonsense? The Whole Story rounds up the latest evidence on the placebo effect, the randomized control trial, personalized genetic medicine, acupuncture, homeopathy, osteopathy and more. It reaches a provocative conclusion: alternative therapies' whole-body approach might be just what medicine really needs right now to help crack the tough, chronic conditions seemingly untouched by the revolutions of surgery, antiseptics, antibiotics, vaccines and molecular biology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780333918937
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	11/24/2000
Series:	Science, Technology and Medicine in Modern History
Edition description:	2000
Pages:	263
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

ROBERTA BIVENS is a Research Associate in the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, where she continues to research cross-cultural medical practices in Twentieth-century Britain.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Cultural Specificity and the Cross-Cultural Transmission of Expert Knowledge Sources for the Study of 'Medical Orientalism' Overview Understanding the Needle: Tool, Technique and Techne PART 1: EXPECTATIONS AND EXPERTISE: EARLY BRITISH RESPONSES TO CHINESE MEDICINE AND TECHNOLOGY The Macartney Mission: Commerce and Discovery Encountering Illness: Lay Expectations of Chinese Medicine Cultural Specificity and Diagnostic Consensus The Professional Opinion: Prepared for Failure Chinese Stories: Narratives of Contention and Narratives of Change The Power of the Pulse: An Early Response to Chinese Diagnostics Through the Eye of the Needle: Medical Politics and the Gillan Report Anderson and Eades: Perceptions of China Below the Salt Medicine's Mirror PART 2: THE NEEDLE TRANSFIXED: TEN RHYNE, KAEMPFER AND THE EUROPEAN GAZE Trade Winds: Wilhelm Ten Rhyne and the Cartography of the Needle Engelbert Kaempfer: Observation and Acupuncture Strangely Familiar: Western Responses to Moxibustion Curiosity Pricked: Lay Responses in France and Britain Eyeing the Needle: Medical Interpretations of Acupuncture Galvanizing The Needle PART 3: SHARPENING THE NEEDLE: BRITISH INTERPRETATIONS OF ACUPUNCTURE, 1802-30 Chinese Whispers: Lay Accounts of Chinese Medicine, 1810-40 Acupuncture in the Medical Periodicals, 1810-22 'For Which it is Most Particularly Recommended': James Churchill and the Singular Needle Interpretive Responses to A Treatise On Acupuncturation 'Any Means, However Ridiculous...': Analysing Acupuncture, 1822-30 Acupuncture Established? PART 4 NETWORKS AND INNOVATIONS: THE PERSISTENCE OF BRITISH ACUPUNCTURE, 1828-90 Networks and Witnesses: Persuasion and Diffusion beyond the Printed Page The Declining Visibility of Acupuncture, 1828-70 Acupuncture, Empiricism and Scepticism 1829-40: Subsidence 1840-70: Submergence The Visible Needle: Sites of Persistence, 1840-70 Medical Periodicals and the Limits of Local Culture The End of the Beginning: British Acupuncture,1890-1901 CONCLUSIONS Continuities in Cross-Cultural Medicine 'Acupuncture' and Assimilation Acupuncture for the National Health Service Continuities in the Cross-Cultural Transmission of Medical Knowledge

Editorial Reviews

A specialist in cross-cultural medical practices in 20th-century Britain, Bivens (history of medicine, U. of Manchester) traces the history of acupuncture in Britain, from exotic tales of 17th-century missionaries in the Far East, through adopted French clinical experimentalism, to partial assimilation into British orthodox therapeutic practice in the 19th and 20th centuries. She ponders the implications of that history for studying the continuity and discontinuities in the cross-cultural transmission of medical knowledge, techniques, and instrumentation. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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