Doctoring traditions : ayurveda, small technologies, and braided sciences / Projit Bihari Mukharji.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mukharji, Projit Bihari, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Medicine, Ayurvedic.

Medicine, Oriental.

Physical Description:

xi, 374 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Summary:

Like many of the traditional medicines of South Asia, Ayurvedic practice changed dramatically in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With "Doctoring Tradition", Projit Bihari Mukharji offers a close look at that transformation, upending the widely held yet little-examined belief that it was the result of the introduction of Western anatomical knowledge and cadaveric dissection. Rather, Mukharji reveals, what instigated those changes were a number of small technologies that were introduced in the period by Ayurvedic physicians, men who were simultaneously Victorian gentlemen and members of a particular Bengali caste. The introduction of these devices, including thermometers, watches, and microscopes, Mukharji shows, ultimately led to a dramatic reimagining of the body. The new Ayurvedic body that thus emerged by the 1930s, while different from the biomedical body, was nonetheless largely compatible with it. The more incompatible elements of the old Ayurvedic body were then rendered therapeutically indefensible and impossible to imagine in practice. The new Ayurvedic medicine, therefore, was the product not of an embrace of Western approaches, but of a creative attempt to develop a viable alternative to the Western tradition by braiding together elements drawn from both the West and the East.

Contents:

Braiding science: refiguring ayurveda

A baidya-bourgeois world: the sociology of braided sciences

The clockwork body: the pocket watch and machinic physiospiritualism

The snayubik man: reticulate physiospiritualism and the thermometer

The chiaroscuric man: visionaries, demonic germs, and the microscope

Endocrino-chakric machine: hormonized humors and organotherapy

Baidya-as-technology: from diagnosis to pharmacy in a bottle

Conclusion: the pataphysics of cosmo-therapeutics: a requiem.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 333-356) and index.

ISBN:

9780226381794

022638179X

9780226383132

022638313X

OCLC:

936350622