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Concepts of Man – Concepts of Health: A Glimpse of Their Relationship in Antiquity With Relevance to Our Day and Age. Referring to ancient miraculous healing narratives, this article argues that concepts of health are inextricably intertwined with concepts of man. However, the relatively autonomous idea of medical treatments based on scientific reasoning is not an invention of modern secularization. It already existed in antiquity – even among people of faith. Gods and other religious authorities were regarded as mediating factors; they were not held responsible for diseases or cures. Examples from Christian and pagan traditions show that the interplay between ideas of man and concepts of health were extremely complex and diverse. Obviously, this was true already in antiquity – but it is even more evident in the present. Dualistic confrontations (e. g., pre-modern versus modern times, pre-scientific healing vs. academic medicine) are of little help to achieve universal health care and global health.
Health in Judaism: An Intercultural Discourse on Lack of Understanding and Misunderstanding in the Past and Present. Hardly any other religion pays as much attention to physical health as Judaism. Beginning with the Torah, the contrast between „healthy“ and „sick“ is already conceptualized and associated with the will of God and his plan of creation. In addition to the stereotype that Jews are sicker than their fellow human beings, there is an early claim that their state of health is better than that of other peoples. The religious writings of Judaism contain a large number of regulations that show how much the Greco- Roman doctrine of dietetics has been internalized, expanded and adapted to one’s own spiritual needs. There is broad consensus among today’s rabbis that health care, as described above all in the Talmud, was time-related and therefore should be based on today’s standards and findings while remaining in compliance with religious laws.
Byzantine Medicine as a Concept of Late Ancient Christian Healing Art. The great success of Greco-Roman medicine – in its main stream a brilliant combination of humoral pathology and dietetics canonized by Galen of Pergamon in the 2nd century CE – is probably the most surprising phenomenon of conceptual longevity in the history of Western culture and civilization. Its decline begins as late as in the early 17th century, when William Harvey describes the circulation of blood on the basis of the new experimental method, initiating not only the collapse of Galen’s theory of blood circulation, but also of humoral physiology and pathology in general. Only then, i. e., more than 1500 years after Galen and 2000 years after Hippocrates, new theoretical concepts of medicine appear on the horizon, gradually replacing medical thinking of antiquity. However, the evolution of Greco-Roman medicine was not a straightforward process; it was strongly influenced by changes in language and dramatic institutional and political changes after the separation of the Roman Empire at the end of the 4th century. Byzantine medicine in the East encompasses the common medical practices of the empire from about 400 to 1453 AD, compiling and standardizing medical knowledge and wisdom (iatrosophia) into new Greek textbooks.
Doing Health: Chinese and Other Perspectives. In ancient China, health was related to the individual person and their unique life. Both medical and philosophical texts testify to this: Maintaining vitality in the course of one’s own lifespan was a priority. Daily caring for one’s health revolved around Qi 氣 – a universal medium that is at the same time material and spiritual, emotional and neutral, unitary and diverse, as well as biological, psychological and physiological. Health thus becomes a verb, an act, a property to be preserved, a wavering and oscillating between pleasure and strength. Not least because of the pandemic, the demand for ‘traditional’ healing expertise rose worldwide. Against this background, early Chinese views on life are of unprecedented importance: From their perspective, a reorientation of public and global health policies seems inevitable.
The Āyurvedic Concept of Health. Āyurveda denominates the most important traditional medical system in South Asia. It looks back on an extensive corpus of literature from the past two thousand years. Since the 1980s, Āyurvedic medical practice has been increasingly spread outside South Asia. One reason for its success might be that Āyurveda places great emphasis on the maintenance of health, prevention, and regeneration. It also developed a broad and differentiated spectrum of diagnostic and therapeutic options, which, based on its own systematic paradigm, have been elaborated in detail over millennia. Āyurveda’s canonical texts not only provide systematic descriptions and definitions of the Āyurvedic understanding of health, they also contain detailed treatises regarding their relevance for everyday life and concrete medical instructions. This article provides basic information about the Āyurvedic understanding of health and contextualizes it within the everyday practice of both conventionally and Āyurvedically trained medical doctors in Germany.
Health in the Presence of the Ancestors: African Healers between Acceptance and Denial: A Case Study from South Africa. Health and well-being for all is the ambitious aim of the third of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (UN). The no less ambitious definition of health of the World Health Organization (WHO) defines that health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. While in biomedical contexts treatment concentrates on physical healing, in the South African context the idea of healing and well-being subsumes a combination of physical, mental and social treatment and includes the ancestors and medicinal plants as an important category in the healing process. The ancestors in particular are representatives of the social past that reaches into the present. Healing as such has a multifaceted dimension even beyond the definition of health as proposed by the WHO.
The Amazon Basin: A Forgotten Cultural Landscape and Its Medicine. While the Amazon region’s ecological importance remains uncontested, its role as a cultural hotspot is largely unknown to most people. Yet, recent archeological findings revise the image of a lush but inhospitable landscape whose farm produce could not sustain advanced civilization. The indigenous people today are only a tiny remainder of a far bigger population that developed impressive agricultural and forest engineering skills – until it was wiped out by diseases brought in from Europe. In fact, modern medicine benefits greatly from biological knowledge of indigenous Amazonians even today. This resource could prove to be much more valuable than any short-term profit realized by slash-and-burn farming or the extraction of raw materials. Therefore, it is all the more important to protect this endangered region. Scientific research will not only help to rescue indigenous biomedical knowledge, it will also give back respect and dignity to socalled savages and their cultural achievements.
A Movement Culture as an Elementary Component of Social and Individual Health: What Can We Learn from the Aboriginal People of Australia? The Aboriginal People’s traditional movement culture is part of the oldest health concept known to man. What can we still save and take on for our society today?
Local Concepts of Health and Illness in Transition: Examples from Papua New Guinea. Papua New Guinea societies integrate traditional medicine, biomedicine, shamanic practices, and Christian healing techniques into herbal therapies. During an episode of illness, patients pragmatically apply different diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Concepts of person and body are central to indigenous illness etiologies and therapeutic practices. This contribution offers an insight into local concepts of health in Papua New Guinea, shows interfaces of local medical systems with biomedical approaches, and addresses the constant change to which medical systems are subject.
The Emergence of Modern Medicine and a New Understanding of Health and Disease: Rudolf Virchow and the Berlin Medical Society. At the beginning of the 19th century, the most important cities for medicine were Paris and Vienna. Berlin had less than 200,000 inhabitants and no university.Within a short period of time, this changed dramatically – and progress in medicine was a main catalyst. At the end of the 19th century, around two million people lived in Berlin and the city had become the world metropolis of modern medicine. This article examines the main causes and the central figures of this astonishing development. The driving force behind this advance was the rise of a new sort of medicine, i. e., a medicine based on evidence and science. Here, the Berlin Medical Society and its long-time president Rudolf Virchow played a central role. His concept of cellular pathology changed the definitions, methods and understanding of health and disease. Thus, it is no exaggeration to state that Virchow served as one of the most important founding fathers of modern medicine.