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Reviewed by:
  • Was ist Medizin? Westliche und östliche Wege der Heilkunst
  • Sander L. Gilman
Paul U. Unschuld . Was ist Medizin? Westliche und östliche Wege der Heilkunst. Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003. 296 pp. Ill. €19.90 (paperbound, 3-406-50224-5).

One of the traditions of the history of medicine that has more or less vanished is the notion that it is possible to write a "History of Medicine." Roy Porter is the most prominent example of a historian who has been professionally willing to make the leap from the scholarly monograph to the overarching narrative history of medicine. Paul Unschuld is one of the West's masters of the history of Chinese medicine: his monographs and translations have made it possible to explore areas of Asian medicine (such as the eighteenth century) that were little known to scholars in the West. His range in the history of medicine is extraordinary, including one of the most moving studies of the impact of the Holocaust on the life of a Jewish woman physician and her non-Jewish husband, Die Ärztin und der Maler (reviewed by me in Bull. Hist. Med., 1995, 69: 649–50).

Unschuld has now undertaken a comprehensive (yet short and readable) comparative history of Eastern and Western medicine, from the ancient world to the present, in some three hundred pages. Writing in a highly accessible style, he has a strong case to make about the parallel development of Eastern and Western medicine—a view that is highly unusual among sinologists (as well as among historians of Western medicine). Generally, the disjunction of East and West is made the core of most arguments. The standard history reads as follows: China is great at the beginning, and becomes less able to continue developments into modernity; the West enters into "modern" medicine only through the Arabs or the Jews, and becomes dominant with the Enlightenment.

Unschuld's argument assumes that there were parallel developments in the two medical worlds, a set of parallel choices, rather than a series of complex borrowings along the Silk Road. By the time he reaches the eighteenth century, the world of Morgagni and Xu Dachun, the reader is convinced of the "natural" progression of medical research along lines that are ever more materialistic. Unschuld's concluding discussion is of the transformation of medicine in the People's Republic and the importation and transformation of "Chinese" medicine in the West.

What is remarkable about this volume is its style. It is written as a type of literary fugue, or symphony, or jazz arabesque, with themes appearing in full at the beginning only to recur in altered but recognizable form. As a result, the reader is encompassed in a learning experience that is compelling. The careful use of examples, the absence of overwhelming detail, and the weaving of general history into the narrative of medical history make this a book unique in the recent history of medicine. It is the sort of volume that should be used in any basic course in the history of medicine that takes as its target the world, not merely the West. In Germany, it is published in a relatively inexpensive paperback edition for the general reader and classroom use; one hopes that an English-language press will make a similar undertaking in the very near future.

Sander L. Gilman
Emory University
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