Focusing on practice more than theory, this collection offers
new perspectives for studying the so-called "humoral medical
traditions," as they have flourished around the globe during the
last 2,000 years. Exploring notions of "balance" in medical
cultures across Eurasia, Africa and the Americas, from antiquity to
the present, the volume revisits "harmony" and "holism" as main
characteristics of those traditions. It foregrounds a dynamic
notion of balance and asks how balance is defined or
conceptualized, by whom, for whom and in what circumstances.
Balance need not connote egalitarianism or equilibrium. Rather, it
alludes to morals of self care exercised in place of excessiveness
and indulgences after long periods of a life in dearth. As the
moral becomes visceral, the question arises: what constitutes the
visceral in a body that is in constant flux and flow? How far, and
in what ways, are there fundamental properties or constituents in
those bodies?
Peregrine Horden is Professor of Medieval History at Royal
Holloway, University of London, and an Extraordinary Research
Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is co-author of The
"Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History" (with Nicholas
Purcell, Blackwell, 2000) and author of "Hospitals and Healing from
Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages" (Ashgate, 2008). He is also
writing a general book on early hospitals for Yale University
Press.
Elisabeth Hsu is Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of
Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Oxford, and
Governing Body Fellow of Green Templeton College. Recent co-edited
volumes include "Wind, Life, Health" (with Chris Low, Blackwell,
2008) and "Plants, Health and Healing: On the Interface of
Ethnobotany and Medical Anthropology" (with Stephen Harris,
Berghahn Books, 2010). Her most recent authored book is "Pulse
Diagnosis in Early Chinese Medicine: The Telling Touch" (Cambridge
University Press, 2010).
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