A Global History of Medicine

A volume exploring the history of medicine across continents and countries from ancient to modern times, examining the changing systems of medicine in Eastern and Western traditions, comparing alternative medical practices, and introducing readers to how historians have captured the multiple approaches to healing adopted by different cultures.

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In recent decades, there has been considerable interest in writing histories of medicine that capture local, regional, and global dimensions of health and health care in the same frame. Exploring changing patterns of disease and different systems of medicine across continents and countries, A Global History of Medicine provides a rich introduction to this emergent field. The introductory chapter addresses the challenges of writing the history of medicine across space and time and suggests ways in which tracing the entangled histories of the patchworks of practice that have constituted medicine allow us to understand how healing traditions are always plural, permeable, and shaped by power and privilege. Written by scholars from around the world and accompanied by suggestions for further reading, individual chapters explore historical developments in health, medicine, and disease in China, the Islamic World, North and Latin America, Africa, South-east Asia, Western and Eastern Europe, and Australia and New Zealand. The final chapter focuses on smallpox eradication and reflects on the sources and methods necessary to integrate local and global dimensions of medicine more effectively. Collectively, the contributions to A Global History of Medicine will not only be invaluable to undergraduate and postgraduate students seeking to expand their knowledge of health and medicine across time, but will also provide a constructive theoretical and empirical platform for future scholarship.