Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1848

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Harvard University Press, 30 jun 2009 - 458 páginas
When did the West discover Chinese healing traditions? Most people might point to the rediscovery of Chinese acupuncture in the 1970s. In Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts, Linda Barnes leads us back, instead, to the thirteenth century to uncover the story of the West's earliest known encounters with Chinese understandings of illness and healing. As Westerners struggled to understand new peoples unfamiliar to them, how did they make sense of equally unfamiliar concepts and practices of healing? Barnes traces this story through the mid-nineteenth century, in both Europe and, eventually, the United States. She has unearthed numerous examples of Western missionaries, merchants, diplomats, and physicians in China, Europe, and America encountering and interpreting both Chinese people and their healing practices, and sometimes adopting their own versions of these practices. A medical anthropologist with a degree in comparative religion, Barnes illuminates the way constructions of medicine, religion, race, and the body informed Westerners' understanding of the Chinese and their healing traditions.

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Introduction
1
Until 1491
8
14921659
36
16601736
72
17371804
126
18051848
212
Conclusion
348
Notes
355
Abbreviations
369
Bibliography
374
Index
437
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Sobre el autor (2009)

Linda L. Barnes is Director of the Masters Program in Medical Anthropology and Cross-Cultural Practice, Division of Graduate Medical Sciences, at Boston University School of Medicine. She holds a joint appointment as Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at BUSM and in the Division of Religious and Theological Studies at Boston University.

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