Vietnamese Traditional Medicine

Vietnamese Traditional Medicine PDF

Author: C. Michele Thompson

Publisher: NUS Press

Published: 2015-06-30

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9971698358

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While reshaping our understanding of the history and development of traditional Vietnamese medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries, Michele Thompson's new book reaches across disciplines to open important perspectives in Vietnamese colonial and social history as well as our understanding of the Vietnamese language and writing systems. Traditional Vietnamese medicine is generally understood as an import from the Chinese tradition: Thompson's detailed historical and linguistic research restores agency and voice to practitioners of Vietnamese medicine, showing how the adoption of Chinese and then Western ideas of medicine in the 19th and 20th centuries relied on indigenous Vietnamese concepts of health and the human body. She mines medical manuscripts in Chinese and in Nom (vernacular Vietnamese) to capture various aspects of the historical interaction between Chinese and Vietnamese thought. She presents a detailed analysis of the Vietnamese response to a Chinese medical technique for preventing smallpox, and to the medical concepts associated with it, looking at Vietnamese healers from a variety of social classes. Thompson's account brings together colorful historical vignettes, contemporary observations and interviews, and textual analysis. It stands out as a demonstration of the power of the history of medicine to illuminate adjacent fields of enquiry. It will be of interest to historians of medicine globally and in East Asia, as well as to students of Vietnam and its complex process of modernization.

Saving the World

Saving the World PDF

Author: Julia Alvarez

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Published: 2007-04-27

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 1616201029

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Latina novelist Alma Huebner is suffering from writer's block and is years past the completion date for yet another of her bestselling family sagas. Her husband, Richard, works for a humanitarian organization dedicated to the health and prosperity of developing countries and wants her help on an extended AIDS assignment in the Dominican Republic. But Alma begs off joining him: the publisher is breathing down her neck. She promises to work hard and follow him a bit later. The truth is that Alma is seriously sidetracked by a story she has stumbled across. It's the story of a much earlier medical do-gooder, Spaniard Francisco Xavier Balmis, who in 1803 undertook to vaccinate the populations of Spain's American colonies against smallpox. To do this, he required live "carriers" of the vaccine. Of greater interest to Alma is Isabel Sendales y Gómez, director of La Casa de Expósitos, who was asked to select twenty-two orphan boys to be the vaccine carriers. She agreed— with the stipulation that she would accompany the boys on the proposed two-year voyage. Her strength and courage inspire Alma, who finds herself becoming obsessed with the details of Isabel's adventures. This resplendent novel-within-a-novel spins the disparate tales of two remarkable women, both of whom are swept along by machismo. In depicting their confrontation of the great scourges of their respective eras, Alvarez exposes the conflict between altruism and ambition.

War Against Smallpox

War Against Smallpox PDF

Author: Michael Bennett

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-06-18

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 1108882609

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Michael Bennett provides the first history of the global spread of vaccination during the Napoleonic Wars, offering a new assessment of the cowpox discovery and Edward Jenner's achievement in making cowpox inoculation a viable and universally available practice. He explores the networks that took the vaccine around the world, and the reception and establishment of vaccination among peoples in all corners of the globe. His focus is on the human story of the horrors of smallpox, the hopes invested in vaccination by medical men and parents, the children put arm-to-arm across the world, and the early challenges, successes and disappointments. He presents vaccination as a quiet revolution, genuinely emancipatory, but also the sharp end of growing state power. By the end of the war in 1815, millions of children had been vaccinated. The early success of the war against smallpox paved the way to further advances towards eradication.

Understanding Cuba as a Nation

Understanding Cuba as a Nation PDF

Author: Rafael E. Tarragó

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-01-20

Total Pages: 163

ISBN-13: 131544447X

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Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1 The Making of a Hybrid Culture: Cuba, 1511-1824 -- 2 The Sugar Kingdom: Nineteenth-Century Cuba -- 3 Military Occupations by the United States of America, and the Republic of Cuba -- 4 The Making of a Socialist Republic: Cuba between 1959 and 2008 -- 5 Cuba under Raúl Castro -- Conclusions: Cuba in 2016 -- Select Bibliography of Books in English -- Index

Bulletin of the History of Medicine

Bulletin of the History of Medicine PDF

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 920

ISBN-13:

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Bulletin is the official publication of the American Association for the History of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Institute of the History of Medicine. Each issue spans the social and scientific aspects of the history of medicine worldwide and includes reviews of recent books on medical history and information about national and international activities in the field.

Vietnam and the West

Vietnam and the West PDF

Author: Wynn Wilcox

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2010-11-15

Total Pages: 226

ISBN-13: 1501711644

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This sound interpretation of Vietnamese cultural attitudes contends that a major reason for American difficulties in Viet-Nam has been the failure to appreciate how wide the gulf is between Viet-Nam and the West. Professor Smith first describes Vietnamese political and social traditions and shows how they were challenged by the West after 1858. He examines Viet-Nam's search for independence and modernization in the first half of this century, contrasts the two governments of the partitioned country during the years 1954-1963, and stresses the critical need to reassess attitudes toward Viet-Nam. His sophisticated, ambitious survey of Viet-Nam history will have a lasting value that sets it apart from the scores of ephemeral books on this country.