Indian Medical Tradition

Series editors

• Dominik Wujastyk (International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden)
• Kenneth G. Zysk (University of Copenhagen)

The aims of the series

Titles 

• History of Mental Illness in India: A Cultural Psychiatry Retrospective, by Horacio Fabrega Jr. (2009).
  
  This book discusses the systems of healing of conditions of psychiatric interest that would have been found in ancient traditional and early modern period. It draws on the findings of Indian epidemiologists who have surveyed the prevalence and distribution of psychiatric disorders in modern and traditional settings of contemporary India. Their findings support the position that such conditions would have been found in earlier historical epochs.  
  In this book, information from cultural anthropology is used to formulate ideas and a perspective that encompass salient cultural and historical parameters of India as a socio-cultural entity which have stood the test of time. Emphasis is placed on how Indian culture, religion, morality, sociology, and philosophical psychology which shape the world view and habit patterns of Indian peoples everywhere and throughout millennia. This nexus of ideas constituted the ontology and epistemology about psychiatric conditions in earlier historical epochs. It shaped their form, content and meaning and it provided a basis for approaches to healing. Normal and not so normal conceptions about behavior and well being are discussed based on indigenous systems of meaning.
  The manner in which psychiatric conditions were and still are formulated in the compilations of Caraka, Susruta, Vagbhata, and Bhela are reviewed and compared along with religious and spiritual viewpoints. Discussion of approach to conditions of psychiatric interest rooted in traditional Indian values provides a basis for critique and plea for broadening the scope and depth of the already vibrant and scientifically compelling psychiatry of contemporary India.  The book aims to make modern psychiatry more responsive to India's understanding of the human condition.
  
• The Madhavanidāna and Its Chief Commentary - Chapters 1-10, by G. Jan Meulenbeld (2008).
  
  This is a reprint of Meulenbeld's classic 1974 publication on Mādhava's text.  Meulenbeld translated the main text of the foundational first ten chapters, together with the main commentary.  This was the first published appearence of a fully translated and commented medical commentary from Sanskrit.  The book has a number of invaluable appendices on plant names, the history of Sanskrit medical literature, and on key ayurvedic concepts.
  
  

• The Nature of the Whole: Holism in Ancient Greek and Indian Medicine, by Vicki Pitman (2006).
  
  Today, the concept of holism is used widely in the field of Complementary and Alternative medicine, where it captures the sense that if medical diagnosis and therapy focus merely on the parts of a patient, or the parts of a disease entitty, then a vital part of the medical situation is lost.  There is a wholeness in the situation, in the unity of the patient's whole life and disease state, that is worth attending to.  And attention to that wholeness leads -- complementary practitioners claim -- to a positive transformation in health care and patient management.   Vicki Pitman's brilliant study traces the history of the idea of wholeness in medicine to its roots in ancient Greek and Indian thought.  She studies the original writings of Hippocrates and Caraka, providing thoughtful and comparative insights into the evolution of the concept in both medical systems.
  
• A Concise Introduction to Indian Medicine, by Guy Mazars (2006).
  
  This is an ideal book for readers wanting to know more about Ayurveda and the other systems of traditional medicine in India. The book sets Indian medicine firmly in its historical context and provides a reliable and unbiassed survey.  Topics covered  include: the origin and development of Indian medicine, its place in modern India and the world, and the theoretical and practical aspects of actual medical diagnosis, prognosis and therapy.  Mazars' book takes account of the best of contemporary scholarship and presents the results in a concise and easily-understood format.
  
  
• The Origin of the Life of a Human Being: Conception and the Female, According to Ancient Indian Medical and Sexological Literature, by Rahul Peter Das (2003). 
  
  This study attempts to determine how the ancient Indian medical and sexological texts would answer a non medical question namely: What happens in a woman's body at the time of conception? This question also has social and relogion relevance. This book also delves deeply into indian medicine and sexological theories in general, and tackle basic principles and concepts, hitherto not satisfactorily dealt. The body of this work has been augmented with several excursuses on special problem of indian medicine and sexology, with an appendix in justaposition with Greek and Unani medicine and select technical terms. 
  
• Studies on Indian Medical History, edited by G. Jan Meulenbeld and Dominik Wujastyk (2001).
  This volume of studies presents the papers given at the second workhop of the European Ayurvedic society. The volume is a sequel to "Proceedings of the international workshop on priorities in the study of Indian medicine". The studies collected here present an unusally wide variety of approaches to the study of the healing arts in India.  
  Contributors include G. Jan Meulenbeld, Rahul Peter Das, Antonella Comba, R. E. Emmerick, Marianne Winder, Arion Rosu, Johannes Laping, T. J. S. Patteson, Dominik Wujastyk, Waltraud Ernst, R. P. Labadie and K. T. D. De Silva, D. von Schmaedel and B. Hochkirchen, and G. M. Carstairs.


• The Jungle and the Aroma of Meats : An Ecological Theme in Hindu Medicine, by Francis Zimmermann  (1999). 
• In classical Ayurvedic medicine, a comprehensive view of the whole human person included the patient's humoral integration into the surrounding soil.  The jungle was the most crucial environment, and the jungle was -- and is -- the dry land of the Punhjab and the Delhi Doab, an open vegetation of thorny shrubs.  The polarity of dry land sand wet lands framed not ony the whole Ayurvedic materia medica, but also the more general conception fo a cosmic physiology goverened by Agni (the sun) and Soma (the dispenser of rain).  Clearling the land and draining the body were two aspects of the same art of managing the transactions of all sorts of vital fluids, saps, jiuices, savours and humours.   In a remarkable evocation that combines Sanskrit studies and anthropology, Zimmermann reconstructs the linkage between humours, persons and soils in classical Hindu medicine.  His work will interest those involved in medical anthropology, medical history, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and South Asian studies.  It will will also be valued for the vivid and accurate descriptions it offers of several fundamental ideas of our time borrowed from Hindu culture: flower power, vegetarianism, non-violence, and the cosmic dimension so the human body.
  
• Asceticism and Healing in Ancient India: Medicine in the Buddhist Monastery, by Kenneth G. Zysk (1998).
• Drawing on a wide range of textual, archaeological and secondary sources, Zysk first presents an overview of the history of Indian Medicine in its religious context. He then examines primary literature from the Pali Buddhist Canon and from the Sanskrit treatise of Bhela, Caraka and Susruta.  From a close and scholarly  examination of the original sources, Zysk presents a path-breaking new interpretation of the earliest history of  medicine  in India.
  
  
  
• Asian Medical Systems, edited by Charles Leslie (1998).
  
  This classic collection of papers on medical history and anthropology has become a foundational work in the field.  It is designed to show how research on Asian medicine opens a new field of scholarship, the comparative study of medical systems. Such a book requires the skills of authors with many kinds of training and those who have contributed essays to this volume are trained in history, sociology, anthropology, public health, pharmacology, epidemiology, cosmopolitan medicine and philosophy. 
  Contributors include A. L. Basham, J. Christoph Buergel, Manfred Porkert, Mark G. Field, Renee C. Fox,  Ivan Polunin, Fredeerick L. Dunn, William Caudill, Alan R. Beals, Gananath Obeyesekere, M. A. Jaspan, Marjorie Topley, Edward Montgomery, Carl E. Taylor, Paul U. Unschuld, Ralph C. Croizier, Charles Leslie, Brahmananda Gupta, and W. T. Jones.
  
  
• Medicine in the Veda: Religious Healing in the Veda, by Kenneth G. Zysk (1997).
  
  The book examines the various internal and external diseases that afflicted the Vedic people and the treatments used to cure them.  This volume looks back to the earliest period (1200-200 BC) in which a clearly discernible medical tradition can be ascertained, providing a comprehensive analysis of the healing lore contained in the ancient Vedic texts.  The first part of the book examines the various internal and external diseases that afflicted the Vedic peopople and the treatments used to cure them.  Zysk includes original translations of particular hymns devoted to the eradication of specific illnesses and to the consecration of medicines.  The second part encompasses textual annotations to the individual hyms together with extensive cross-refrerences to other vedic texts and a valuable bibliographical essay.

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