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Reviewed by:
  • Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions
  • Luke Demaitre
Don Bates, ed. Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical Traditions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. xiii + 369 pp. Ill. $64.95 (cloth); $24.95 (paperbound).

The papers in this volume originated in a workshop on the role of the written word in the legitimation of medical knowledge. Meant to be seminal rather than definitive, they show minimal editorial intervention. As a result, the collection is rather uneven in style and substance, with the typical strengths and weaknesses of a colloquium. Thematic unity is provided mainly in the introduction by Don Bates, which is worth rereading after finishing the book. In the interdisciplinary exchange, insights from history and philosophy are enriched by sociologists and anthropologists (and sometimes burdened by their social-science jargon).

In the effort of the workshop to broaden the understanding of Western learned medicine by comparative methods, a broadly conceived “Galenism” serves as the vantage point for explorations of long-lived Asian traditions. New light is shed on epistemologies of Greek and Latin physicians—especially by Lesley Dean-Jones, who examines the authority of women in Hippocratic gynecology, and by Faith Wallis, who exposes flawed yet common assumptions regarding canonical texts. Parallels and contrasts between European and Chinese outlooks are identified in several essays, but they are pursued systematically in the outstanding articles by Nathan Sivin, on the relation between text and experience, and by Shigehisa Kuriyama, on ways of seeing the body. Indian characteristics are discussed far more tentatively: this is in part because A|yurveda suffers from a comparative dearth of textual evidence, as Francis Zimmermann observes (without noting the irony for a medical tradition that has the most expressly scriptural identity). The Islamic world receives less attention than is merited by its position between East and West and by the amount and nature of Arabic writings, although it is sampled in Lawrence Conrad’s analysis of the polemic between Ibn Butlan and “Ali ibn Ridwan. The analysis underscores two features shared by all the major traditions—namely, dependence on the social context, and competition between the teaching of a master and the learning acquired from books. A real “blind spot” of the workshop, regretted belatedly by the editor, caused modern Unani medicine to be overlooked altogether.

One may also discern an imbalance in the chronological perspective that ignores the treatment of the Western scholarly legacy after the seventeenth century but includes the current status of Asian traditions, in post-Maoist China and in the A|yurveda of contemporary India. The oversights as well as the best contributions in this collection should stimulate further study of medical epistemology, even of aspects as old-fashioned as the Western combinations between knowledge (episteme, scientia), wisdom (gnosis, sapientia), and skill (techne, ars); [End Page 140] their Eastern equivalents or opposites; and their respective applications to diagnosis and prognosis, etiology, and therapeutics.

Luke Demaitre
Washington, Virginia
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