Volker Scheid
Biographic Data
| ID | 630731 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Volker Scheid |
| GIVEN NAMES | Volker |
| FAMILY NAME | Scheid |
| SIGNATURE | SCHEID V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Westminster |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9410-8412 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 18 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Why Study Asian Medicine
Asian Medicine is inaugurating a new type of article in this issue, the editorial forum. For our launch of this new format, an international range of scholars working on Asian medicine across different geographical, temporal, and disciplinary contexts were invited to respond to the question “Why study Asian medicine?” The perspectives they have expressed here reflect their diverse interests, motivations, and career trajectories across the spectru…
The Neglected Role of Buddhism in the Development of Medicine in Late Imperial China Viewed through the Life and Work of Yu Chang 喻昌 (1585–1664)
Despite significant revisions over recent decades, the field of medicine in late imperial China continues to be defined by a number of problematic boundaries such as that between medicine and religion. In this article I challenge the validity of this boundary through a detailed examination of the life and work of the hugely influential seventeenth-century physician Yu Chang (1585-1664), whose openly Buddhist critique of literati medicine has hith…
Introduction to History of Science Special Section on tong 通
Promoting free flow in the networks: Reimagining the body in early modern Suzhou
The history of Chinese medicine is still widely imagined in terms dictated by the discourse of modernity, that is as 'traditional' and 'Chinese.' And yet, so as to be intelligible to us moderns, it must simultaneously be framed through categories that make it comparable somehow to the 'West' and the 'modern' from which it is said to be essentially different. This is accomplished, for instance, by viewing Chinese medicine as fundamentally shaped b…
Convergent Lines of Descent: Symptoms, Patterns, Constellations, and the Emergent Interface of Systems Biology and Chinese Medicine
During the first decade of the twenty-first century, a network composed of politicians, regulators, bioscientists, clinical researchers, and Chinese medicine specialists has emerged that seeks to bridge an imagined gulf between the modern West and ancient China in order to create a new type of personalized medicine. The central building block of this bridge is the Chinese medical concept of zheng /, variously translated into English as syndrome, …
The People’s Republic of China
Transmitting Chinese Medicine: Changing Perceptions of Body, Pathology, and Treatment in Late Imperial China
Historians of Chinese medicine acknowledge the plurality of Chinese medicine along both synchronic and diachronic dimensions. Yet, there remains a tendency to think of tradition as being defined by some unchanging features. The Chinese medical body is a case in point. This is assumed to have been formalised by the late Han dynasty around a system of internal organs, conduits, collaterals, and associated body structures. Although criticism was voi…
The Treatise on Cold Damage as a Window on Emergent Formations of Medical Practice in East Asia
This special themed subsection on East Asian Medicine explores the Treatise on Cold Damage (Shanghan lun ) as a window on emergent formations of medical practice in China, Japan, and Korea between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Composed by Zhang Zhongjing (c. 150-219 CE) towards the end of the Eastern Han dynasty, the Treatise is a brief clinical manual that discusses the treatment of feverish disorders. It belonged to a genre of similar …
Depression, Constraint, and the Liver: (Dis)assembling the Treatment of Emotion-Related Disorders in Chinese Medicine
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is today practiced worldwide, rivaling biomedicine in terms of its globalization. One of the most common TCM diagnoses is "Liver qi constraint," which, in turn, is commonly treated by an herbal formula dating back to the 10th century. In everyday TCM practice, biomedical disease categories such as depression or anxiety and popular disease categories such as stress are often conflated with the Chinese medical not…
Xiaoping Fang, Barefoot Doctors and Western Medicine in China
The name ‘barefoot doctors’ evokes revolutionary images of young Chinese men and women providing low-cost medical services to the rural masses by means of ‘one silver needle and a bunch of herbs’ as a popular saying of the time put it. The well-known ‘Barefoot Doctor's Manual’ helped to popularise Chinese medicine across the world, and the barefoot doctor system inspired the 1978 World Health Organisation conference in Alma Ata that lead to the s…
Constraint 鬱 as a Window on Approaches to Emotion-Related Disorders in East Asian Medicine
According to widely publicized WHO data "depression" is an epidemic that by 2020 is set to become the second most important cause of disease throughout the world (World Health Organization 2012). Yet, what the WHO identifies as an emerging pandemic requiring a coordinated global response, more critical voices see as the unreflective application of problematic disease labels that fail to understand and therefore help real patient needs These criti…
The Mangle of Practice and the Practice of Chinese Medicine: A Case Study from Nineteenth-Century China
Globalising Chinese Medical Understandings of Menopause
This essay examines the treatment of menopausal syndrome by Chinese medicine as a window on how globalisation impacts on the development of the Chinese medical tradition. The treatment strategies for menopausal syndrome were invented in 1964 and betray a strong influence of biomedical thinking. Today, they are sold both at home and abroad as products of 2,000 years of clinical experience. Close examination of textual sources reveals that such att…
Globalising Chinese Medical Understandings of Menopause
This essay examines the treatment of menopausal syndrome by Chinese medicine as a window on how globalisation impacts on the development of the Chinese medical tradition. The treatment strategies for menopausal syndrome were invented in 1964 and betray a strong influence of biomedical thinking. Today, they are sold both at home and abroad as products of 2,000 years of clinical experience. Close examination of textual sources reveals that such att…
Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine: An Ethnographic Account from Contemporary China (review)
Reviewed by: Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine: An Ethnographic Account from Contemporary China Volker Scheid Yanhua Zhang. Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine: An Ethnographic Account from Contemporary China. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. xiv + 191 pp. Ill. $74.50 (cloth, 978-0- 7914-6999-6), $24.95 (paperbound, 978-0-7914-7000-8). This is a wonderful little boo…
Chinese Medicine and the Problem of Tradition
In the West, but not only in the West, Asian medicines continue to be understood and promoted through a discourse that emphasises their status as 'traditions'. Chinese medicine, widely referred to throughout the world as 'Traditional Chinese Medicine' (TCM), is an obvious example. The problematic nature of this practice, which uses tradition as the 'other' of modernity, has often been criticised, yet no alternative has yet emerged. One solution m…
Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis
As a traditional healing art that has established a contemporary global presence, Chinese medicine defies categories and raises many interesting questions. If Chinese medicine is "traditional," why has it not disappeared with the rest of traditional Chinese society? If, as some claim, it is a science, what does that imply about what we call science? What is the secret of Chinese medicine's remarkable adaptability that has allowed it to prosper fo…
Remodeling the Arsenal of Chinese Medicine: Shared Pasts, Alternative Futures
The discourse on alternative medicine assumes that medical practices exist as distinctive medical systems that compete with each other in plural health care systems. Anthropological and historical research clearly demonstrates, however, that this is not so. Many so-called traditional medicines are revealed as inventions of distinctly modern regimes of knowledge and institutional practice, while the political needs of healers and the epistemologic…
Remodeling the Arsenal of Chinese Medicine: Shared Pasts, Alternative Futures
The discourse on alternative medicine assumes that medical practices exist as distinctive medical systems that compete with each other in plural health care systems. Anthropological and historical research clearly demonstrates, however, that this is not so. Many so-called traditional medicines are revealed as inventions of distinctly modern regimes of knowledge and institutional practice, while the political needs of healers and the epistemologic…
Promoting free flow in the networks: Reimagining the body in early modern Suzhou
The history of Chinese medicine is still widely imagined in terms dictated by the discourse of modernity, that is as 'traditional' and 'Chinese.' And yet, so as to be intelligible to us moderns, it must simultaneously be framed through categories that make it comparable somehow to the 'West' and the 'modern' from which it is said to be essentially different. This is accomplished, for instance, by viewing Chinese medicine as fundamentally shaped b…
Introduction to History of Science Special Section on tong 通
Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis
As a traditional healing art that has established a contemporary global presence, Chinese medicine defies categories and raises many interesting questions. If Chinese medicine is "traditional," why has it not disappeared with the rest of traditional Chinese society? If, as some claim, it is a science, what does that imply about what we call science? What is the secret of Chinese medicine's remarkable adaptability that has allowed it to prosper fo…
Remodeling the Arsenal of Chinese Medicine: Shared Pasts, Alternative Futures
The discourse on alternative medicine assumes that medical practices exist as distinctive medical systems that compete with each other in plural health care systems. Anthropological and historical research clearly demonstrates, however, that this is not so. Many so-called traditional medicines are revealed as inventions of distinctly modern regimes of knowledge and institutional practice, while the political needs of healers and the epistemologic…
Chinese Medicine and the Problem of Tradition
In the West, but not only in the West, Asian medicines continue to be understood and promoted through a discourse that emphasises their status as 'traditions'. Chinese medicine, widely referred to throughout the world as 'Traditional Chinese Medicine' (TCM), is an obvious example. The problematic nature of this practice, which uses tradition as the 'other' of modernity, has often been criticised, yet no alternative has yet emerged. One solution m…
The Mangle of Practice and the Practice of Chinese Medicine: A Case Study from Nineteenth-Century China
Globalising Chinese Medical Understandings of Menopause
This essay examines the treatment of menopausal syndrome by Chinese medicine as a window on how globalisation impacts on the development of the Chinese medical tradition. The treatment strategies for menopausal syndrome were invented in 1964 and betray a strong influence of biomedical thinking. Today, they are sold both at home and abroad as products of 2,000 years of clinical experience. Close examination of textual sources reveals that such att…
Globalising Chinese Medical Understandings of Menopause
This essay examines the treatment of menopausal syndrome by Chinese medicine as a window on how globalisation impacts on the development of the Chinese medical tradition. The treatment strategies for menopausal syndrome were invented in 1964 and betray a strong influence of biomedical thinking. Today, they are sold both at home and abroad as products of 2,000 years of clinical experience. Close examination of textual sources reveals that such att…
Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine: An Ethnographic Account from Contemporary China (review)
Reviewed by: Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine: An Ethnographic Account from Contemporary China Volker Scheid Yanhua Zhang. Transforming Emotions with Chinese Medicine: An Ethnographic Account from Contemporary China. SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. xiv + 191 pp. Ill. $74.50 (cloth, 978-0- 7914-6999-6), $24.95 (paperbound, 978-0-7914-7000-8). This is a wonderful little boo…
Constraint 鬱 as a Window on Approaches to Emotion-Related Disorders in East Asian Medicine
According to widely publicized WHO data "depression" is an epidemic that by 2020 is set to become the second most important cause of disease throughout the world (World Health Organization 2012). Yet, what the WHO identifies as an emerging pandemic requiring a coordinated global response, more critical voices see as the unreflective application of problematic disease labels that fail to understand and therefore help real patient needs These criti…
The People’s Republic of China
Transmitting Chinese Medicine: Changing Perceptions of Body, Pathology, and Treatment in Late Imperial China
Historians of Chinese medicine acknowledge the plurality of Chinese medicine along both synchronic and diachronic dimensions. Yet, there remains a tendency to think of tradition as being defined by some unchanging features. The Chinese medical body is a case in point. This is assumed to have been formalised by the late Han dynasty around a system of internal organs, conduits, collaterals, and associated body structures. Although criticism was voi…
The Treatise on Cold Damage as a Window on Emergent Formations of Medical Practice in East Asia
This special themed subsection on East Asian Medicine explores the Treatise on Cold Damage (Shanghan lun ) as a window on emergent formations of medical practice in China, Japan, and Korea between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. Composed by Zhang Zhongjing (c. 150-219 CE) towards the end of the Eastern Han dynasty, the Treatise is a brief clinical manual that discusses the treatment of feverish disorders. It belonged to a genre of similar …
Depression, Constraint, and the Liver: (Dis)assembling the Treatment of Emotion-Related Disorders in Chinese Medicine
Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is today practiced worldwide, rivaling biomedicine in terms of its globalization. One of the most common TCM diagnoses is "Liver qi constraint," which, in turn, is commonly treated by an herbal formula dating back to the 10th century. In everyday TCM practice, biomedical disease categories such as depression or anxiety and popular disease categories such as stress are often conflated with the Chinese medical not…
Xiaoping Fang, Barefoot Doctors and Western Medicine in China
The name ‘barefoot doctors’ evokes revolutionary images of young Chinese men and women providing low-cost medical services to the rural masses by means of ‘one silver needle and a bunch of herbs’ as a popular saying of the time put it. The well-known ‘Barefoot Doctor's Manual’ helped to popularise Chinese medicine across the world, and the barefoot doctor system inspired the 1978 World Health Organisation conference in Alma Ata that lead to the s…
Convergent Lines of Descent: Symptoms, Patterns, Constellations, and the Emergent Interface of Systems Biology and Chinese Medicine
During the first decade of the twenty-first century, a network composed of politicians, regulators, bioscientists, clinical researchers, and Chinese medicine specialists has emerged that seeks to bridge an imagined gulf between the modern West and ancient China in order to create a new type of personalized medicine. The central building block of this bridge is the Chinese medical concept of zheng /, variously translated into English as syndrome, …
Introduction to History of Science Special Section on tong 通
Promoting free flow in the networks: Reimagining the body in early modern Suzhou
The history of Chinese medicine is still widely imagined in terms dictated by the discourse of modernity, that is as 'traditional' and 'Chinese.' And yet, so as to be intelligible to us moderns, it must simultaneously be framed through categories that make it comparable somehow to the 'West' and the 'modern' from which it is said to be essentially different. This is accomplished, for instance, by viewing Chinese medicine as fundamentally shaped b…
The Neglected Role of Buddhism in the Development of Medicine in Late Imperial China Viewed through the Life and Work of Yu Chang 喻昌 (1585–1664)
Despite significant revisions over recent decades, the field of medicine in late imperial China continues to be defined by a number of problematic boundaries such as that between medicine and religion. In this article I challenge the validity of this boundary through a detailed examination of the life and work of the hugely influential seventeenth-century physician Yu Chang (1585-1664), whose openly Buddhist critique of literati medicine has hith…
Why Study Asian Medicine
Asian Medicine is inaugurating a new type of article in this issue, the editorial forum. For our launch of this new format, an international range of scholars working on Asian medicine across different geographical, temporal, and disciplinary contexts were invited to respond to the question “Why study Asian medicine?” The perspectives they have expressed here reflect their diverse interests, motivations, and career trajectories across the spectru…
China (12 works) · History (12 works) · Medicine (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Philosophy (7 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Psychology (6 works)