Making sense of health, disease, and the environment in cross-cultural history : the Arabic-Islamic World, China, Europe and North America / Florence Bretelle-Establet, Marie Gaille, Mehrnaz Katouzian-Safadi, editors.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Bretelle-Establet, Florence, editor.

Gaille, Marie, editor.

Katouzian-Safadi, Mehrnaz, editor.

Series:

Boston studies in the philosophy and history of science ; 0068-0346 volume 333.

Boston studies in the philosophy and history of science, 0068-0346 ; volume 333

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Environmental health--History.

Environmental health.

Environmental health--Cross-cultural studies.

Environmental Health.

History.

Medical Subjects:

Environmental Health.

Genre:

Cross-cultural studies.

Physical Description:

xxi, 378 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Cham : Springer, [2019]

Summary:

This book has been defined around three important issues: the first sheds light on how people, in various philosophical, religious, and political contexts, understand the natural environment, and how the relationship between the environment and the body is perceived; the second focuses on the perceptions that a particular natural environment is good or bad for human health and examines the reasons behind such characterizations ; the third examines the promotion, in history, of specific practices to take advantage of the health benefits, or avoid the harm, caused by certain environments and also efforts made to change environments supposed to be harmful to human health. The feeling and/or the observation that the natural environment can have effects on human health have been, and are still commonly shared throughout the world. This led us to raise the issue of the links observed and believed to exist between human beings and the natural environment in a broad chronological and geographical framework. In this investigation, we bring the reader from ancient and late imperial China to the medieval Arab world up to medieval, modern, and contemporary Europe. This book does not examine these relationships through the prism of the knowledge of our modern contemporary European experience, which, still too often, leads to the feeling of totally different worlds. Rather, it questions protagonists who, in different times and in different places, have reflected, on their own terms, on the links between environment and health and tries to obtain a better understanding of why these links took the form they did in these precise contexts. This book targets an academic readership as well as an "informed audience", for whom present issues of environment and health can be nourished by the reflections of the past.

Contents:

Part I. Environment, Disease, and the Body: Observations, Definitions and Theories

Chapter 1. Creation, Generation, Force, Motion, Habit: Medieval Theoretical Definitions of Nature

Chapter 2. The Animal Environment and Human Health. The Approach Followed by the Medieval Zoologist, Ğāhiẓ (ninth century)

Chapter 3. Landscaped Environment and Health in Han China (208 BCE

220)

Chapter 4. The Construction of Thinking on the Environment: the Words, Their Meanings, and Their Uses from 1790 to 1970

Chapter 5. Environment in Relation to Health, Wellbeing and Human Flourishing: The Contribution of Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy of Life and of the Subject

Chapter 6. Environment and Chagas Disease: an Elusive and Diverse Relationship

Part II. Healthy or Unhealthy Environments: for whom and for what?

Chapter 7. The Worst Environment in which to Live in China: a Question of Points of View. The Legendary Miasmatic Far South of China Challenged by Local Doctors in Late Imperial China

Chapter 8. Inhabited Lands and Temperaments. Between Observations and Therapeutic Solutions, the Views of Medieval Scientists and Physicians: al-Ğāḥiẓ (9th), Rāzī (9th-10th), Ibn Riḍwān (11th)

Chapter 9. Health and the Environment: Aldo Leopold, Land Health and the First Person Ecology Approach

Chapter 10. Urban Space of the Living and Dead. The Conception of Environment and Death in Beijing from the 18th Century to the Middle 20th Century

Chapter 11. Urban Nature: (the) Good and (the) Bad

Chapter 12. Health and the Environment in Ecological Transition: the Case of the Permaculture Movement

Chapter 13. Affordances': A Concept to Reflect on the Relationships between the Body and Its Environment

Chapter 14. Gestalt Therapy and its Contribution to the Understanding of the Link between Health and the Environment.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Other Format:

Electronic version: Making sense of health, disease, and the environment in cross-cultural history.

ISBN:

9783030190811

3030190811

9783030190828

303019082X

OCLC:

1140971095