The Body in Balance ― Humoral Medicines in Practice

To use popular terms, you are a combination of secretions. When the combination gets out of balance, you will get sick. If you overindulge in one thing or another, you will get sick. If you ignore how the combination is going, you will get sick. The only way to get well is to set the combination back on track, and keep it on track. It sounds fairly simple, but in fact the practice of humoral medicine is complex and delicate, and each region and culture which practices it has its own preferences and demands. These twelve articles concentrate on the body, practices, and the role of balance, starting with female fluids in the Hippocratic corpus, fluxes and stagnations, and when money became a humor. They then concentrate on practice, including discerning when the four humors became fundamental to medieval Islamic medical practice, complexion and experiment, tibb in India, Mesoamerican heat and cold in diet and health, balance in East Africa, anger in Chinese medicine, the golden rule of Ayurveda, Tibetan healing practices, and the medical-moral nexus of moderation. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Elisabeth Hsu is Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Oxford, and Governing Body Fellow of Green Templeton College. Recent co-edited volumes include Wind, Life, Health (with Chris Low, Blackwell, 2008) and Plants, Health and Healing: On the Interface of Ethnobotany and Medical Anthropology (with Stephen Harris, Berghahn Books, 2010). Her most recent authored book is Pulse Diagnosis in Early Chinese Medicine: The Telling Touch (Cambridge University Press, 2010).