medicine

The Province of Affliction

Province Affliction cover

With a global pandemic uprooting most every basic element of modern social life that so many of us have taken for granted throughout our entire lives, it is not surprising that some are looking back into the past to learn what those who lived in L.P. Hartley’s metaphorical “foreign country” where they “do things differently” did when faced with such epidemiological challenges. Many doing so are naturally looking to the early twentieth century and its influenza pandemic; however travelling a bit farther back may be an even more enlightening journey.

Plants That Kill / Plants That Cure

Plants Cure cover

It’s the age-old balance – pain and pleasure, sorrow and happiness, death and life; so many of the things of the world which bring about one are inextricably linked to the other, and even sometimes one and the same. For millennia, folk healers and herbalists, whose spheres of activity have developed, expanded, and diversified into those of physicians and pharmacists, while also still existing in modernized forms of traditional practice, as well as fields of more academic study such as ethnobotany, have sought for treatments and cures in the world of plants. And, in reference to the aforementioned balance, some of the plants so used, when prepared or employed differently, hold the power to take as well as preserve life.

A Way of Life

Way of Life cover

Some years ago, at the end of a three week business trip across China, two days before I was to leave for home, I contracted amoebic dysentery – or something resembling it at least. Violently ill and rapidly worsening, my Chinese colleagues were urging me to allow them to take me to a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) to be treated. Like most who are not familiar with TCM, I recoiled at the idea, preferring to trust my fate to the travel pack of pre-prescribed antibiotics I carried on such trips for just such emergencies.

Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers

Mad Dogs cover

Prof. Jessica Wang’s “Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers; Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840–1920” examines not only rabies as a disease in itself, but also as a gateway of enquiry into a number of historical questions about the life of that city during its period of rapid expansion in the nineteenth early twentieth centuries.

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