Eastern medicines are becoming more popular in the west, but few people realize how long the two cultures have exchanged ideas. Now an exhibition at the Science Museum in London explores how the two have interacted on medicine through the centuries.
Called East Meets West: Medical Ideas on the Move. It looks at examples of how ideas and technologies have moved from one side of the world to another. It opens on Thursday and is based on an exhibition presented by the Welcome Trust; Neil Fazakerley is curator of the exhibition. He said: "It’s attractive because it’s taking a medical history story but from a slightly different angle, showing how the different cultures have interacted."
"It’s obvious that eastern medical practices are becoming more popular in the west but maybe people don’t know that ideas have been exchanged for thousands of years and medicine is not a static thing." The exhibition details four main areas: Ancient Greek and Islamic medical ideas, and how they were reborn into western culture. The exhibition starts in the ninth and tenth centuries when Baghdad was the centre of Islamic science and its highly sophisticated medical system. Through the translation work of Persian scholars, ancient Greek medical thought was brought into tlie Islamic medical system. It was when westerners started charging into the east on crusades during the twelfth century that European scholars became increasingly interested in Islamic medicine.
Arabic material was translated into Latin, the European scholars’ language of the time, thus preserving the Greek tradition that may otherwise have been lost. Coexistence of Islamic and Indian traditions and the development of western medicine in colonial India--the traditional Indian medical system, known as ayurveda or "the knowledge of life"--has existed in some form for more than 2,000" years. During foreign invasions from the elh century onwards the Islamic unani system of medicine was brought to India.
The Indian name for Islamic medicine "unani" refers originally to the Greeks. The two systems comple- mented each other well and both ayurveda and unani flourish today in India. European colonists from the six- th century onwards, gained knowledge of plants, diseases and surgical techniques that were unknown in the West. One such example is rauwolfia (萝芙木) serpentia (姜蛇根), a plant used in traditional Indian medicine. The active ingredient is today used to treat hypertension and anxiety in the west. The flow of ideas turned with the growth of the British Empire in the eighth and nineth centuries, as many Western-style hospitals and medical colleges were established in India.
Inoculation--a true example of collaborative medicine.
"A good example of the exchange of medical ideas between east and west is that of immunization," the exhibition says. Smallpox inoculation has long been used by physicians in Asia and Africa by deliberately at- tempting to give people a mild smallpox infection. The technique became known in Europe in the eighth century and this technique was practiced for a while on the British aristocracy.
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