Medical Error and Medical Truth: The Placebo Effect and Room for Choice in Ayurveda

I attempt to relativize allopathic medicine, or Modern Establishment Medicine (MEM), specifically in the context of the ayurvedic medical system of India, and to promote Daniel Moerman’s concept of the medical “meaning response” as a preferable conceptualization of the phenomena usually subsumed under the name “placebo.” Finally, I suggest that once these steps have been taken, a space opens up in which informed ayurvedic practice – indeed, any human activities aimed at promoting health – may find a valid place

The Yoga texts attributed to Yājñavalkya and their remarks on posture

This essay disambiguates the yoga texts associated with the name of the ancient Indian sage Yājñavalkya. Two key works are identified and reflections are offered on their manuscript and print histories. A text and translation of the section on yoga postures (āsana) from one of these works is presented, with a discussion of the historical evolution of these posture descriptions

The Elephant's Footprint: An Ancient Indian Logic Diagram

A seminal article by Margaret Baron, published in 1969, explored the history of set diagrams (Venn diagrams). However, Baron did not look beyond the evidence of European sources. This article presents evidence of a literary simile from ancient India that exemplifies the idea of a larger circle including within it many smaller circles, each circle standing for an ethical concept. The simile – an elephant's footprint enclosing the footprints of smaller animals – first appears in the Buddhist Canon, and it was used occasionally in South Asian literature through the following millennia until the eighteenth century. I argue that the Elephant's Foot simile can be added to Baron’s catalogue of historical cases where ancient authors were using language that implied a simple concept of logical sets

C. Pierce Salguero (Editor). Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources. xxi + 689 pp., figs., bibl., index. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. $150 (cloth). ISBN 9780231179942.

Review of C. Pierce Salguero (Editor). Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources. xxi + 689 pp., figs., bibl., index. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. $150 (cloth). ISBN 9780231179942

Interpreting the Image of the Human Body in Premodern India

This paper sets out two main arguments. In part one, a description of the adherents of the various intellectual disciplines and religious faiths in premodern India is given, each having developed distinct and different imagined bodies; for example, the body described in Tantric circles had little or nothing in common with the body described in medical circles. In part two, an account is given of the encounter between Ayurvedic anatomy and early colonial European anatomy which led initially to attempts at synthesis; these gave way to an abandonment of the syncretist vision of the body and the acceptance of an epistemological suspension of judgment, in which radically different body conceptualizations are simultaneously held in unacknowledged cognitive dissonance

On the Plastic Surgery of the Ears and Nose: The Nepalese Version of the Suśrutasaṃhitā

A thousand-year-old Ayurvedic manuscript containing the Compendium of Suśruta was announced to the scholarly world in 2007. The Nepalese manuscript, since adopted by UNESCO as part of the Memory of the World, reveals the state of classical Indian medicine in the ninth century. It enables us to study the changes in this medical classic that have taken place from the ninth to the nineteenth century, when printed texts began to dominate the dissemination of the work. The present monograph describes the research project focussed on this manuscript and offers an edition, study and translation of the historically important chapter about the plastic surgery on the nose and ears