There is a type of knowledge that presents itself as entirely neutral—as if it merely records reality exactly as it is, free from self-interest, ideology, or history. Medicine claims to describe the body. Psychiatry claims to describe the mind. Jurisprudence claims to describe justice. Modernism, that massive intellectual climate that defined the 19th and 20th […]
In the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Leo Tolstoy presents a man who is shocked by suddenly realising that his death is inevitable. While we can easily appreciate that the diagnosis of a terminal illness came as an unpleasant surprise, how could he only then discover the fact of his mortality? But that is […]
For more than 1,000 years, the Imperial Family of Japan and its physicians have preserved a treasure of oriental medicine: the complete 30 scrolls of the Ishinhō, or the ‘heart of medical prescription’. This compendium was derived from sources in India, China, Korea and elsewhere, though many of the original documents have since been lost or destroyed. In […]