The Knowledge of Healing (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUPThe Knowledge of Healing examines the contemporary practice of Tibetan medicine. It joins a large body of narrowly focused and often ethnocentric presentations that aim to show that Tibetan herbal therapies do indeed work, their efficacy to be ultimately verified by Western scientists and tested in isolation from any understanding of indigenous epistemological taxonomies. This approach has been criticized by medical anthropologists, but it survives still in most popular presentations (and, indeed, many scholarly and scientific accounts) of "traditional" medical systems.1
The film begins with Tenzin Choedrak, the Dalai Lama's personal physician, reading from the Four Tantras (the twelfth-century work that remains the primary text of Tibetan medicine today) and discussing a set of seventeenth-century medical paintings that depict such topics as anatomy, embryology, and materia medica. The doctor is then shown at the Tibetan hospital in Dharamsala, India, performing the traditional Tibetan diagnostics of pulse analysis, and treating patients with moxibustion and cupping.
From India the setting moves to a hospital in the region of Buryatia, Russia, near the Mongolian border, where Tibetan medicine has been practiced for centuries. A patient is examined by both a biomedical ("Western") doctor and a practitioner of traditional Tibetan medicine; the latter physician prescribes a set of herbal compounds that substantially reverse the patient's arteriosclerosis, which had failed to improve under treatment by the physician of biomedicine. The film, which includes stunning footage of scenery in Buryatia and northern India, depicts the substances used in such compounds, how medicinal substances are classified, and how compounds are put together. The Badmaev (spelled "Badmajew" in the [End Page 862] film) family of Russian physicians is introduced, several of whom are practitioners of Tibetan medicine. Peter Badmaev's research took him to Switzerland, where he worked with scientists on the production and testing of herbal tablets based on Tibetan pharmaceutical recipes; a Swiss pharmacist, an immunologist, an Austrian biophysicist, and an Israeli microbiologist offer comments on the positive results of these trials for the treatment of several serious health conditions.
The Knowledge of Healing does convincingly suggest that Tibetan herbal remedies are worthy of serious consideration by researchers and patients alike. Success in conveying this message to a wider public may help preserve a complex system of medical thinking and practice that is threatened today by both political and ideological factors. Tibetan medicine—at least Tibetan herbal remedies—may thus increasingly find a place in the treatment of chronic diseases, and this enhanced popularity may in turn stimulate the critical research by humanists and scientists that is needed in order to obtain a more historically and culturally nuanced understanding of the tradition.
Beautifully shot in Indian, Russian, and European locations, this is the most artful film on its topic. There is no narrator, allowing practitioners and patients themselves to talk about their expertise and experiences with Tibetan medicine. Although this is pleasing aesthetically, substantial explanatory detail that could have been provided by a narrator is therefore absent. While the film's visual linking of the twelfth-century Four Tantras, the seventeenth-century medical paintings, and the examination of patients in a modern clinic implies the continuity of a monolithic tradition, Tibetan medicine, like any other scholarly and practical institution with a thousand-year history, has seen much controversy and change. Aimed at a popular audience, The Knowledge of Healing is useful in providing a general introduction to the tradition, but it lacks any scholarly sensitivity to historical and geographic particularity. With the recent exciting recovery of a number of Tibetan histories of medicine thought to have been destroyed in the People's Republic of China, it is now possible to reconstruct the development of Tibetan medicine with attention to the diversity of its...
