> Research & Reports ‘Wellcome’ Asia: Histories of Medicine in the UK The Wellcome Trust, the well-known British educational charity, has played a sterling range of funds and be deployed to is closely related to the power struc- role in encouraging the development of research and teaching expertise in the history examine a variety of important issues. tures which gave birth to it and keep of medicine in the United Kingdom. At the moment the Trust funds three different Medical ethics in Asian contexts has changing it. < units at the universities of Oxford, Manchester, and East Anglia (Norwich), and one recently become the focus of discus- major centre in London. sions between the Wellcome Trust Cen- Reference tre and the IIAS, and will hopefully lead _ Hofstede, Geert, Culture’s Consequences: By Sanjoy Bhattacharya twentieth centuries, while Vivienne Lo to a collaborative research programme International Differences in Work-Related News > concentrates on the ancient and in the near future. It is to be hoped that Values, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage (1980). General he Wellcome Trust Centre for the medieval periods in China. the examination of this significant topic THistory of Medicine at University Dominik Wujastyk has recently been will encompass a transnational and Dr Leo Douw is Lecturer in Modern Chinese College London, now directed by pro- appointed as a senior research fellow multi-disciplinary perspective. A simi- History and Society at the University of fessor Harold Cook, has recently and is now working on medical trends lar approach could also, of course, be Amsterdam and the Free University in Ams- strengthened its Asian Studies compo- in on the eve of colonialism. The used in a broad study of the attitudes terdam. He has engaged in the study of Chi- nent with two lecturers and a fellow in centre’s new specialist on Central Asia, held by Asian minority and migrant nese overseas business enterprise in China addition to the two lecturers already research fellow Hormoz Ebrahimnejad, communities in Europe towards state- during the twentieth century, and is cur- working there. Dealing with the histo- researches the introduction of Western sponsored healthcare provisions – rently working towards the study of business ry of South Asia, Sanjoy Bhattacharya medical practices in nineteenth-centu- another important theme that has families in Taiwan during the Japanese Peri- mainly works on the nineteenth and ry Iran, which he describes in this issue received far less attention than it od (1895-1945). Info > of the IIAS Newsletter, but is also inter- deserves. Hopefully, the start that the [email protected] ested in Afghanistan’s history. Alex Wellcome Trust Centre and the IIAS For fellowship applications, you may contact professor McKay, who joined us on 1 October made in this regard will lead to a series Prof. Chan Kwok Bun is Head of and Pro- Cook with a copy of your CV and a two- or three- page 2002 with a three-year fellowship, is of productive international partner- fessor at the Department of Sociology and research proposal, to be considered by the Centre’s working on the transmission of West- ships. < Director of the David C. Lam Institute for Research Committee before selected names are forward- ern medicine in Himalayan South Asia East-West Studies at Hong Kong Baptist ed to the Trust for its fellowship competition. between 1900 and 1947. Dr Sanjoy Bhattacharya is a lecturer at the University. Having published on a wide vari- The centre’s Asian Studies compo- Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of ety of sociological topics, he is now concen- Doctoral candidates (with their own funding) nent will be enhanced through the Medicine at University College London. He trating on problems of transcultural inter- may contact Dr Michael Neve: [email protected] development of large projects in col- specializes in the history of medicine in action and the workings of Chinese business Details are available from the centre’s website: laboration with international research South Asia, with particular emphasis on the networks in the global economy. www.ucl.ac.uk/histmed organizations. Such collaborative work nineteenth and twentieth centuries. [email protected] could be developed with the help of a [email protected] What Is Medicine? Analysing Narratives of Illness and Healing medicine is recognized today as one of the world’s most cine. Associated with the Bon religion, and claiming origins that takes into account conventions of his- complex and sophisticated systems of medicine. Over the last 1300 dating back to centuries before Tibetan , Bon med- tory and fiction specific to Tibetan contexts. years, Tibetan medical traditions have produced a vast corpus of icine is an ancient medical tradition. Taught in Bon monas- Medical narratives found in the earliest extant Tibetan texts literature analogous in complexity to the medical scholasticism of India, teries, specific medical schools, or through oral transmission from Dunhuang (ninth century AD) present ‘Bon’ priests China, or Greece. Tibetan medical systems are practised widely today in by hereditary lineages of Bon doctors, it is still practised today healing sick patients and clearly contain non-Buddhist ideas the countries of , Bhutan, and Mongolia; in Tibetan populated by Bon medical practitioners in the People’s Republic of and practices. Tibetological scholarship has demonstrated areas of the People’s Republic of China; in parts of Russia (Kalmykia, China, and in indigenous and exile Tibetan communities in that some of these early narratives are thematically related to Buryatia); and throughout India (, Sikkim, and in Tibetan refugee Nepal and India. Historical and anthropological research on later Tibetan healing practices. Our project will compare heal- settlements). The popularity and use of Tibetan medicine is growing in Bon medicine will facilitate a scholarly analysis of the com- ing narratives in these early medical texts and in later Europe, North America, and the Pacific Rim as well. plexities of local medical practice and of indigenous under- eleventh- to fifteenth-century Bon literature with those known standings of health and illness in everyday life in Tibetan and used by Bon medical practitioners and their patients By Mona Schrempf and Frances Garrett communities. In the effort to understand how Bon medicine today. The research results will contribute to our knowledge Research > is defined as a tradition distinct from other forms of Tibetan of early Tibetan medicine and to defining a distinctive tradi- Central Asia tudies on Tibetan medicine generally refer to the ‘clas- medicine, this project will also contribute to the larger ques- tion of Bon medicine. Additional comparisons of Bon nar- Ssical’ medical system, which is largely influenced by Bud- tion of how medical and religious disciplinary boundaries ratives with contemporaneous Buddhist narratives will con- dhist notions of the body and the human condition. With an are drawn in both historically and today. tribute to discussions about theoretical confluences and emphasis on medical theory, existing historical research on distinctions of both traditions. Tibetan medicine stresses the influence of the Indian Narratives of illness and healing Historical and ethnographic research will aim to show that, Ayurvedic humoral system and Chinese pulse diagnosis, and Drawing on methodologies of history of medicine and med- in contrast to the way Tibetan medicine is presented by most focuses on the institutionally codified body of Tibetan med- ical anthropology, this project will analyse ‘story-like’ narra- scholarship today, Tibetan medical systems are not only empir- ical literature comprised by the Four Tantras (rGyud bzhi) and tive descriptions of individual experiences of illness and relief ically founded explications of natural phenomena, but also its commentaries. Many studies of Tibetan medicine are lim- from illness in Tibetan Bon literature and practice. In such ideological and cultural narratives greatly influenced by ited by a scientifically oriented epistemology that places value narratives, notions of self, society, and culture are negotiated changes in religious and social concepts, local and historical in the study of medical systems only in the search for effec- and made meaningful. These narratives – crucial components contexts, and other forms of culture. This approach identifies tive healing techniques. Medical anthropologists, in turn, of medical education, medical theory and practice, and the medicine as a player in a far larger discourse than simply that have concentrated mostly on the impact of modernity and healing process – will support an analysis of cultural con- of medicinal healing. It exposes broad hermeneutic issues that socio-political change among Tibetan patients on the public structions of illness and healing in Bon literature and prac- shape the relationship of medicine and culture in world soci- health system and on the institutionalization and profes- tice; their analysis will help clarify the relationship between eties, questioning the validity of superimposing our own epis- sionalization of traditional Tibetan medicine, as exemplified centralized and localized medical practices, written and oral temological taxonomies on classical Asian thought. < in the largest Tibetan medical institutions, the sMan rtsis histories, and text and performance. There are compelling rea- khang in Lhasa () and in Dharam- sons to use narrative as an organizational rubric for the study Frances Garrett, MA is a scholar of classical Tibetan medical, reli- sala (Indian exile). of medicine. In the last few decades, many sociologists and gious, and historical literature and the developer of Tibetan Medi- Despite a growing interest in Tibetan medicine, the plu- philosophers of science have challenged the approach of log- cine Learning Resources. She has performed preliminary research on ralistic diversity of Tibetan medical systems, that is their tex- ical empiricism, its ontological privileging of scientific knowl- healing narratives in Tibetan texts and done fieldwork on Tibetan tual, institutional, and localized practical forms, has received edge, and the adequacy of logico-scientific rationality. In its medicine in India and Tibet. little scholarly research attention outside Tibet. By examin- place some have embraced an understanding of the social and [email protected] ing modern-day Bon narratives of illness and healing and the historical contingency of all types of knowledge, including sci- http://iris.lib.virginia.edu/tibet/collections/medicine/TMLR.html historical development of such narratives in ninth- to fif- entific knowledge. The ontological concept of disease, for teenth-century Tibetan literature, this project aims to artic- example, based most centrally on a cataloguing of symptoms, Dr Mona Schrempf has worked on cultural-religious revivals among ulate the boundaries of a distinctive tradition of Bon medi- was an historical development in seventeenth-century Euro- Tibetan Bon communities in both China and India with recent field- pean medicine that revolutionized diagnosis and treatment. work on Bon medical practice. Specializing in oral history and med- Note > It is not necessarily, however, a well-suited model for the analy- ical anthropology, she holds a PhD in social anthropology from the sis of early systems of medicine, even within European intel- Free University Berlin, and is currently affiliated with the Depart- The authors express gratitude to Henk Blezer ([email protected]) lectual history, let alone for the analysis of Tibetan medical ment of Anthropology, South Asia Institute, Ruprecht-Karls-Uni- for his earlier comments on this . systems. The present project will therefore involve the careful versität, Heidelberg. development of a theory of the role of medical narrative in [email protected]

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