COHERENCE REVIEW OF ESSENTIAL FUNDAMENTALS OF UNANI, AYURVEDA, SIDDHA AND HOMEOPATHY SYSTEMS OF MEDICINE

Medicine, defined as the science and practice of the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease. The word medicine springs from Latin medicus, meaning “physician″. According to Henry Sigerist, the medical historian has stated that every culture had developed a system of medicine and medical history is but one aspect of history of culture. India, with its rich cultural heritage, has been in the forefront in contributing to the medical sciences, and there is plenty of proof of the same. Ayurveda, Yoga and Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha, and Homeopathy (AYUSH) is one component of the six indigenous systems of medicine practiced in India. The art of tending to the sick is as antique as the humanity itself. The ancient civilizations probably knew about the functions, physiology and anatomy of the human physique in surprising details, and their art of tending the sick remains an evidence of their knowledge. The medical systems that are truly Indian in origin and development are Ayurveda and as well the Siddha system. Unani-Tibb and Homeopathy, though not of Indian origin, have a significant importance in health care in India. Today, India is among the leading countries as far as the practice of Unani medicine is concerned. This paper will be an attempt in analysing the insights of various fundamental principles and key concepts of Unani, Ayurveda, Siddha and Homeopathy along with their differential aspects.

Not merely the absence of disease: A genealogy of the WHO’s positive health definition

The 1948 constitution of the World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’. It was a bold and revolutionary health idea to gain international consensus in a period characterized by fervent anti-communism. This article explores the genealogy of the health definition and demonstrates how it was possible to expand the scope of health, redefine it as ‘well-being’, and overcome ideological resistance to progressive and international health approaches. The first part of the article demonstrates how the health definition was composed through a trajectory of draft ideas from scholars in the history of medicine, as well as political actors working to promote national health insurance. The definition was authored by League of Nations veteran Raymond Gautier, but secretly drew heavily on medical historian Henry E. Sigerist’s controversial book Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union (1937). The second part analyses how it was possible to resist the ideological pushback against the WHO and secure US ratification. The WHO’s progressive constitution was not simply a deviation from dominant health ideas, but a direct outcome of the entrenched health conflict. The genealogy is based on original archival material from international organizations and US government archives. The article contributes to understandings of the political controversies surrounding the WHO and to scholarship on understandings of health. It also illustrates how influential health ideas cross the boundaries between politics and health sciences, as well as the boundaries between domestic health policy and global health.

Romanticism and Medicine

Is there such a thing as Romantic medicine? The literary classification of Romanticism and the practice of medicine might initially appear to be incompatible; the former being a cultural form that encompasses ideas about originality, imagination and experience, the latter concerned with the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease. However, the medical historian Roy Porter suggests that while there was little development in the practice of medicine in Britain during the Romantic period (‘those years [did not] bring a revolution in medicine and in health’ –1999, 170) there was a transformation in the understanding of the body. Although the Romantic era neither transformed the practice of medicine nor drastically altered life expectancy, addressing ‘the experience of the body and of suffering was an essential component in that journey into the self that constitutes … the Romantic interlude’ (ibid., 177). Porter suggests that there was a shift from an earlier view of the body as an ahistorical entity responding to the universal laws of physics to one which detected a symbiotic relationship between the self, society and sickness. The body and its suffering can be read as socially constructed entities, the consideration of which intersects with the larger cultural concerns of Romanticism such as personal and political liberty, the conflict between that which is natural and that which is socially constructed, and the distinction between individual solitude and communal responsibility.

Henry R. Viets, MD, and the history of myasthenia gravis

Henry R. Viets (1890–1969) was both a noted neurologist and medical historian. While at Harvard Medical School, from which he graduated in 1916, he attracted the attention of Harvey Cushing who directed Viets into these disciplines. Cushing arranged for Viets to take a fellowship in Oxford in the year after his graduation. With Cushing's recommendation, he lived with Sir William and Lady Osler and did research with the famous neurologist Sir Charles Sherrington. Viets was in London in 1935 when he heard about the remarkable success of Mary Walker in treating myasthenia gravis, first with physostigmine and then with neostigmine (Prostigmin). Securing an ampoule of this drug, he took it to the Massachusetts General Hospital where he was an attending neurologist and in March 1935 injected it into a myasthenic patient with great success. He established the first Myasthenia Gravis Clinic in the world and was a pioneer in the treatment of this once obscure disease: he evaluated hundreds of patients and published many articles on myasthenia. He continued this association for over 30 years. Under the tutelage of Cushing and Osler, Viets became a medical historian and bibliophile, publishing hundreds of articles and several books on many different subjects in the history of medicine. He was the President of the American Association for the History of Medicine and curator of the Boston Medical Library that eventually joined with the Harvard Medical School Library. Viets served on the Editorial Board of the New England Journal of Medicine for 40 years.

Lucia and the Auscultation of Disease in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France

As many scholars have shown, regardless of its popularity today, the ‘mad scene’ of Lucia di Lammermoor was not popular in the several years that followed the premiere in 1835. In fact, audiences, critics and publishers of opera selections for the salon preferred the love duet of act 1 or the final scene of the opera when Edgardo kills himself upon hearing the news that Lucia is dead. In this article, I explore early nineteenth-century notions of hysteria, a disease that manifested with both physical and emotional symptoms. If undiagnosed, the individual suffering from the disease would experience muscle contractions, pupil dilations, delusions, cardiac arrest and eventual death. One of the seminal studies of hysteria in the first half of the nineteenth century was written by the French physician and medical historian Frédéric Dubois d'Amiens (1799–1873), who published in 1833 Histoire philosophique de l'hypochondrie et de l'hystérie, a 500-plus page investigation into the cause and cure of hysterics and hypochondriacs. Through an investigation of the diagnosis of hysteria in d'Amiens's work and the sound and look of hysteria in Donizetti's opera, now made more acute through familiarity with the newly invented stethoscope (1816, René Laennec) and its ability to deliver the internal sounds of the body, we can see how close the opera comes to mirroring the look and sound of the disease, which may explain the lack of enthusiasm and in some cases outright hostility to Lucia's fall into madness in the early reception of the work in France.

‘My insanity in the year 1783’, by C.S. Andresen (1801)

The literature of the past has included self-reports by the mentally ill since before Roy Porter reminded us that their views and experiences constitute an important document for historians of psychiatry. The value of these self-reports can be enhanced if their potential biases and informational power are duly determined. This Classic Text concerns a self-report of a form of periodic madness written by an eighteenth-century Danish vicar. It shows how the same document can be presented in a more or less neutral fashion by a medical historian (Maar) or used as ‘evidence’ for some ‘ontological’ view of madness by a clinician (Rasmussen).

Kurt Aterman, MUDR, MB, BCh BAO HONS, DCH, MRCP, PhD, DSc, FRCPath: “A Small Man With a Very Large Cerebrum and a Soul to Match”

Kurt Aterman was raised in the Czech-Polish portions of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War I and the interwar period. After completing medical school and beginning postgraduate pediatrics training in Prague, this Jewish Czech physician fled to England as a refugee when the Nazis occupied his homeland in 1939. He repeated/completed medical training in Northern Ireland and London, working briefly as a pediatrician. Next, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corp in India, working as a pathologist. After the war and additional pathology training, he spent the next decade as an experimental pathologist in Birmingham, England. After completing a fellowship with Edith Potter in Chicago, Aterman spent the next 2 decades as a pediatric-perinatal pathologist, primarily working in Halifax, Canada. Fluent in many European languages, he finished his career as a medical historian. Aterman published extensively in all 3 arenas; many of his pediatric pathology papers were massive encyclopedic review articles, accurately recounting ideas from historical times. Aterman was a classical European scholar and his papers reflected this. Aterman was one of the founding members of the Pediatric Pathology Club, the predecessor of the Society for Pediatric Pathology. This highly successful refugee’s writings are important and memorable.

On being a patient

Those who practise medicine should remember that we are all patients at some time, most likely at the beginning and end of our lives. Therefore, this textbook begins with an account of encounters with the medical and nursing professions, written by an outstanding doctor, medical historian, and leading clinical scientist. After a highly distinguished and eventful career which spanned the introduction of the British National Health Service in 1948, Christopher Booth died in 2012, aged 87 years. Latterly, he experienced the protracted misery of illness punctuated by repeated surgery; but to the end he retained his intellect and penetrating wit. His piquant observations are a challenge to us all as we try to provide care for our patients, as is his parting shot: ‘If you are a physician, no matter how important you may think that you are, you should, so far as your own illnesses are concerned, consider yourself a layman.’

Ancient Greek Spermatology

From the fifth century bc onwards, the scientific interests of the ancient Greeks—already traceable in the earliest remaining sources—expanded to include zoology and related matters. The first philosopher known to have written a book about human biology was Alcmaeon of Croton, who is described as a pupil of Pythagoras. One important basic question in his research concerned the origin and nature of semen. According to the Viennese medical historian Erna Lesky, Alcmaeon held merely that semen has its origin in the brain. My suggestions are that Alcmaeon saw the abdomen as the place of origin of the material part of semen and that in his theory all (or at least more) parts of the body were present in the semen, while the brain functioned as a necessary transit port through which life entered.