Health and Illness: A Cross‐cultural Encyclopedia

“This volume provides information about three different though interrelated health care systems ‐ biomedicine, alternative and complimentary, and traditional”. So begins the preface to the 40 sections of the book. These sections cover treatment systems like acupuncture, aspects of medicine like ageing, medical problems like plagues, problems with a medical consequence like famine, and aspects of human behaviour such as suicide. A few more section headings will give even more idea of the spread; among those that caught my interest are Christian Science, magnetic healing, genital mutilation, and environmental disasters. In those sections I have read I am on the...