This volume of studies presents the papers given at the workshop of the European Ayurvedic Society which was held in September 1985, in the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in London. It provided a splendid opportunity for scholars in the field of Indian medical history to meet in one place, and to share the latest research in their respective areas. The studies here collected present an unusually wide variety of approaches to the study of the healing arts in India. The historical sources used range from ancient Sanskrit manuscripts and Tibetan blockprints, through nineteenth century Indian newspapers and government reports, to conversations held in the consulting rooms of contemporary Ayurvedic doctors. While each approach is both valid and valuable in its own terms, their combination in the present book provides a view of Indian medical history which transcends the barriers between scholarly disciplines and gives the reader some sense of the vastness of the subject. Divided into three complementary parts : The classical tradition’, ‘Colonial interactions’, and ‘Modern observations’, it reflects both a division in the source materials, and the different scholarly skills required to exploit them, those of the Indologists, the historian, and the medical anthropologist and pharmacognosist.
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