Description:
- Offers new perspectives for studying the so-called "humoral medical traditions" over the last 2,000 years
- Re-visits "harmony" and "holism" as main characteristics of these traditions
- Asks how "balance" is defined, by whom, for whom, and in what circumstances
Brief description:
Peregrine Horden is Professor of Medieval History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and an Extraordinary Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is co-author of The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (with Nicholas Purcell, Blackwell, 2000) and author of Hospitals and Healing from Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages (Ashgate, 2008). He is also writing a general book on early hospitals for Yale University Press.
Review Quotes:
"The collection presents a fascinating comparative history of the concept of balance throughout medical practice across the world, with disparate chapters well connected through thematic discussion." - Social History of Medicine
"The book is a magisterial collection...In spite of the wide range of medical traditions concerned-from different continents (Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America) and at different epochs (ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary)-the book is coherently structured around a few core issues that consistently link all the chapters. Rarely will you find in a single volume so many authoritative scholars talking about the specificities of their field of research and, at the same time, constructing a comparative dialogue." - Caterina Guenzi, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris
"This is a model of what an edited volume can and should be, bringing a wide range of geographic and temporal frames into dialogue to help rethink a notion that is arguably crucial to each one of them. It is a superior study, and I am confident that it will become a classic volume in the history of medicine." - Carla Nappi, University of British Columbia
"This is an excellent collection of essays...[that] provides an extremely good basis for comparative studies. There is no similar collection, to my knowledge." - Vivian Nutton, University College London