Acupuncture, Expertise and Cross-Cultural Medicine

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction: Cultural Specificity and the Cross-Cultural Transmission of Expert Knowledge

   • Roberta E. Bivins

   Pages 1-14

3. Expectations and Expertise: Early British Responses to Chinese Medicine and Technology

   • Roberta E. Bivins

   Pages 15-45

4. The Needle Transfixed: Ten Rhyne, Kaempfer and the European Gaze

   • Roberta E. Bivins

   Pages 46-94

5. Sharpening the Needle: British Interpretations of Acupuncture, 1802–30

   • Roberta E. Bivins

   Pages 95-133

6. Networks and Innovations: the Persistence of British Acupuncture, 1828–90

   • Roberta E. Bivins

   Pages 134-181

7. Conclusions: Continuities in Cross-Cultural Medicine

   • Roberta E. Bivins

   Pages 182-198

8. Back Matter

   Pages 199-263

   PDF

Alternative medicine is a fifty billion dollar per year industry. But is it all nonsense? The Whole Story rounds up the latest evidence on the placebo effect, the randomized control trial, personalized genetic medicine, acupuncture, homeopathy, osteopathy and more. It reaches a provocative conclusion: alternative therapies' whole-body approach might be just what medicine really needs right now to help crack the tough, chronic conditions seemingly untouched by the revolutions of surgery, antiseptics, antibiotics, vaccines and molecular biology.

• acupuncture
• alternative medicine
• Chinese medicine
• health
• medical knowledge
• moxibustion
• osteopathy

• Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, UK

  Roberta E. Bivins

ROBERTA BIVENS is a Research Associate in the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, where she continues to research cross-cultural medical practices in Twentieth-century Britain.

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