Doctoring traditions : ayurveda, small technologies, and braided sciences /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Mukharji, Projit Bihari, author.
Imprint:	Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Description:	1 online resource
Language:	English
Subject:	Medicine, Ayurvedic. Medicine, Oriental. Medicine, Ayurvedic. Medicine, Oriental. Medicine, Ayurvedic -- history. Delivery of Health Care -- history. Diffusion of Innovation. Cultural Characteristics -- history. History, 19th Century. History, 20th Century. India.
Format:	E-Resource Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/11265739

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9780226381824 022638182X 9780226381794 022638179X 9780226383132 022638313X
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index. Print version record.
Summary:	Like many of the traditional medicines of South Asia, Ayurvedic practice changed dramatically in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With "Doctoring Tradition", Projit Bihari Mukharji offers a close look at that transformation, upending the widely held yet little-examined belief that it was the result of the introduction of Western anatomical knowledge and cadaveric dissection. Rather, Mukharji reveals, what instigated those changes were a number of small technologies that were introduced in the period by Ayurvedic physicians, men who were simultaneously Victorian gentlemen and members of a particular Bengali caste. The introduction of these devices, including thermometers, watches, and microscopes, Mukharji shows, ultimately led to a dramatic reimagining of the body. The new Ayurvedic body that thus emerged by the 1930s, while different from the biomedical body, was nonetheless largely compatible with it. The more incompatible elements of the old Ayurvedic body were then rendered therapeutically indefensible and impossible to imagine in practice.0The new Ayurvedic medicine, therefore, was the product not of an embrace of Western approaches, but of a creative attempt to develop a viable alternative to the Western tradition by braiding together elements drawn from both the West and the East.
Other form:	Print version: Mukharji, Projit Bihari. Doctoring traditions. Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016 9780226381794

Table of Contents:

Braiding knowledge: refiguring ayurveda
A baidya-bourgeois world: the sociology of braided sciences
The clockwork body: the pocket watch and machinic physiospiritualism
The snayubik man: reticulate physiospiritualism and the thermometer
The chiaroscuric man: visionaries, demonic germs, and the microscope
Endocrino-chakric machine: hormonized humors and organotherapy
Baidya-as-technology: from diagnosis to pharmacy in a bottle
Conclusion: the pataphysics of cosmo-therapeutics: a requiem.

Doctoring traditions : ayurveda, small technologies, and braided sciences /

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