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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.
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.
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.