Coordinators: Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim (University of Pennsylvania), Michael Stanley-Baker (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Joaquín Terrones (MIT)
The Idea: Motivations & Scope
This pillar draws on historical knowledge and experiences of medicine, health, and well-being across the diversity of human cultures and explores how they can help us address today’s challenges in medicine and global healthcare. By examining how diverse societies have historically defined and practiced health, we gain valuable insights into mind-body connections, preventive care, personalized medicine, and links with the environment. The project aims to tap into historically-rooted medical knowledge to enhance both medical practice and public understanding across the wide variety of our world’s societies in need of more effective, more sustainable, and more humane care for the living and dying. Advocating for a broader, multi-perspective multi-epistemological approach to therapeutics that incorporates insights from traditional Eurasian practices, this pillar will develop tools and insights from medical history and anthropology for the benefit of meeting some of today’s global health complexities, such as personalised medicine, healthy ageing, chronic disease, and polypharmacy.
Guiding Questions
- How do different cultural and historical paradigms measure, describe and practice “medicine,” “health,” and “healing”? What can we learn from these diverse approaches in addressing modern health and healthcare issues?
- What can we learn from traditional medicines to crucially improve the incidence and treatment of lifestyle-related chronic diseases, which have become leading causes of death in industrialized countries?
- What are the benefits and challenges of adopting approaches to wellness that are grounded in different cultural and theoretical assumptions about medicine and health?
- How do the current paradigms and practices of research and accreditation implicitly and explicitly discredit traditional medical knowledge, and how can we overcome these obstacles and stimulate supporting research of the highest integrity and rigor?
- What interventions can we make in legislative/actuary and clinical spheres? How can policymakers and healthcare practitioners collaborate to integrate insights from historically and culturally diverse health and healthcare models?
- How can we advocate for including knowledge and practices from traditional healing systems in today’s medical education and public health policies around the world?
Goals & Actions
- Develop a multi-pronged approach to the understanding of health and healing in this historical moment when medicine is searching for new perspectives in particular on avoidable chronic physical and mental illnesses and public healthcare crises. Our approach takes into consideration what histories and anthropologies of the body, of health and of public health in deep time and space across the planet can teach us
- Create a sustained platform for encounter and debate among historians of medicine, cultural and intellectual historians, as well as scholars of medical humanities and social sciences at large, and practitioners, clinicians, and even patients will lead to valuable advances which are urgently needed in today’s increasingly complex global health situation, which demands fresh approaches
PROJECT: Global Medical Heritage in the Age of Bioregulation