This book traces the long history of practices and ideas around healing processes in China from the earliest evidence we have found on oracle bones (late Shang dynasty, ca. thirteenth century BCE) to the "Chinese medicine" currently promoted on the Internet in our globalized world. It owes much to the dynamic research undertaken since the 1930s by the Chinese themselves and by international academics over the last four decades. The book illustrates, by its very format, that this dynamism has gone from strength to strength: in addition to comprehensive contributions written by the nine leading international scholars Constance Cook, Vivienne Lo, Fan Ka-wai, TJ Hinrichs, Angela Ki Che Leung, Yi-Li Wu, Bridie Andrews, Volker Scheid, and Linda Barnes, we find more than fifty sidebars written by forty or so outstanding researchers which notably open windows on new fieldwork in such countries as Tanzania, Iraq, and Argentina.
