Main description:

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 connoteegalitarianism 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?

Contents:

List of Figures and Tables

Acknowledgements

List of Contributors

Introduction

Peregrine Horden

Part I: A Body of What?

Chapter 1. Female Fluids in the Hippocratic Corpus: How Solid was the Humoral Body?

Helen King

Chapter 2. Fluxes and Stagnations: A Physician's Perception and Treatment of Humours in Baroque Ladies

Barbara Duden

Chapter 3. When Money became a Humour

Shigehisa Kuriyama

Part II: A Practice with What?

Chapter 4. Were the Four Humours Fundamental to Medieval Islamic Medical Practice?

Emilie Savage-Smith

Chapter 5. Complexio and experimentum: Tensions in Late Medieval Medical Practice

Peter Jones

Chapter 6. Foundationalism and Instrumentality: Rethinking Humoral Paradigms in Early Twentieth-Century Yunani tibb in India

Guy Attewell

Chapter 7. Hot Cold Classifications and Balancing Actions in Mesoamerican Diet and Health: Theory and Ethnography of Practice in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Ellen Messer

Part III: A Balance of What?

Chapter 8. Balancing Diversity and Well-Being: Words, Concepts and Practice in Eastern Africa

David Parkin

Chapter 9. 'Holism' and the Medicalization of Emotion: The Case of Anger in Chinese Medicine

Elisabeth Hsu

Chapter 10. Aiming for Congruence: The Golden Rule of Ayurveda

Francis Zimmermann

Chapter 11. Harmony or Hierarchy? The Mindful Body and the Sacred Landscape in Tibetan Healing Practices

Patrizia Bassini

Part IV: What Next?

Chapter 12. What Next? Balance in Medical Practice and the Medico-Moral Nexus of Moderation

Elisabeth Hsu

Index