Medicine and the Law: Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on the Comparative History of Medicine--East and West, September 4-10, 1994, Susono-shi, Shizuoka, Japan (review) (original) (raw)
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The study of medical history is a currently expanding field, but one that took a long time to form. Modern ideas about what medicine is, and about what premodern eras were, have often been at odds. Moreover, particularly in the modern period, class, race, and gender have all affected how medicine is conceptualized and accessed. We will be examining these tensions, and attempting to resolve them in our own work. Any historians--including, now, us--looking at medicine are faced with methodological difficulties, as for much of history, medical texts were not grouped or defined as such. In this course, we shall engage with such questions as: How do we define medicine? How do we talk about medicine? How do we decide, as individuals and societies, when to take it and how to give it? We shall also consider how illness and health are defined, and how they define the lives of the sick. We shall examine the ways in which medicine is shaped by social structures, cultural norms, and religious values.
HISTORY OF MEDICINE (syllabus)
Catalogue Description: Worldwide survey of medicine, disease, and health from prehistoric times to the present. Course Description: The study of medicine is a currently expanding field, but one that took a long time to form. Modern ideas about what medicine is, and about what premodern eras were, have often been at odds. Moreover, particularly in the modern period, class, race, and gender have all affected how medicine is conceptualized and accessed. We will be examining these tensions, and attempting to resolve them in our own work.
This paper was written to study the order of medical advances throughout history. It investigates changing human beliefs concerning the causes of diseases, how modern surgery developed and improved methods of diagnosis and the use of medical statistics. Human beliefs about the causes of disease followed a logical progression from supernatural causes, such as the wrath of the Gods, to natural causes, involving imbalances within the human body. The invention of the microscope led to the discovery of microorganisms which were eventually identified as the cause of infectious diseases. Identification of the particular microorganism causing a disease led to immunization against the disease. Modern surgery only developed after the ending of the taboo against human dissection and the discovery of modern anaesthesia and the discovery of the need for anti-septic practices. Modern diagnostic practices began with the discovery of x-rays and the invention of medical scanners. Improved mathematics, especially in probability theory, led to statistical studies which led to a much greater ability, to identify the causes of disease, and to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments. These discoveries all occurred in a necessary and inevitable order with the easiest discoveries being made first and the harder discoveries being made later. The order of discovery determined the course of the history of medicine and is an example of how social and cultural history has to follow a particular course determined by the structure of the world around us.
Writing, Authority and Practice in Tokugawa Medicine, 1650-1850
2014
This dissertation examines the history of medical knowledge in Tokugawa Japan through a study of the relationships between medical texts, social institutions and clinical practices. It situates the history of Japanese medicine during this period within its regional and global contexts, analysing Japanese doctors' engagement with ideas and practices drawn from medical cultures in China, Korea, and Europe and showing how these ideas and practices became integrated into the medical cultures of Japan itself. Part One focuses on the written representations of medical knowledge. From the seventeenth century onwards, the medical literature available within Japan came to include more widely accessible texts published in Japanese (kana) as well as texts in classical Chinese (kanbun), but classical Chinese writings remained authoritative. The close philological study of classical Chinese texts became a central problem for practitioners of "Ancient Formulas" (kohō 古方) medicine, and philological forms of evidential argument provided a model for new ways of using the empirical evidence of medical practice.