This path-breaking collection offers an integrative model for understanding health and healing in Europe and the Mediterranean from 1250-1550. By foregrounding gender as an organizing principle of healthcare, the contributors challenge traditional binaries that ahistorically separate care from cure, medicine from religion, and domestic healing from fee-for-service medical exchanges. The essays collected here illuminate previously hidden and undervalued forms of healthcare and varieties of body knowledge produced and transmitted outside the traditional settings of university, guild, and academy. They draw on non-traditional sources-vernacular regimens, oral communications, religious and legal sources, images and objects-to reveal additional locations for producing body knowledge in households, religious communities, hospices, and public markets. Emphasizing cross-confessional and multi-linguistic exchange, the essays also reveal the multiple pathways for knowledge transfer in these centuries. The volume provides a synoptic view of how gender and cross-cultural exchange shaped medical theory and practice in later medieval and Renaissance societies.

Caring for the Living Soul identifies the fundamental role played by emotions in the development of learned medicine and in the formation of the social role of the "physicians of the body" in the western Mediterranean between 1200 and 1500.

In this volume, prominent anthropologists, public health physicians, and psychiatrists respond sympathetically but critically to the Movement for Global Mental Health (MGMH), which seeks to export psychiatry throughout the world. They question some of its fundamental assumptions: the idea that "mental disorders" can clearly be identified; that they are primarily of biological origin; that the world is currently facing an "epidemic" of them; that the most appropriate treatments for them normally involve psycho-pharmaceutical drugs; and that local or indigenous therapies are of little interest or importance for treating them. Instead, the contributors argue that labeling mental suffering as "illness" or "disorder" is often highly problematic; that the countries of South and Southeast Asia have abundant, though non- psychiatric, resources for dealing with it; that its causes are often social and biographical; and that many non-pharmacological therapies are effective for dealing with it. In short, they advocate a thoroughgoing mental health pluralism.

A single, unique document - a list of one merchant's baggage - is the starting point used to bring to life the twelfth-century Indian Ocean. Drawing connections between material culture, foodstuffs and the construction of identity, Lambourn examines notions of home and mobility at a key moment in world history.

A magnificent proliferation of new Christ-centered devotional practices—including affective meditation, imitative suffering, crusade, Eucharistic cults and miracles, passion drama, and liturgical performance—reveals profound changes in the Western Christian temperament of the twelfth century and beyond. This change has often been attributed by scholars to an increasing emphasis on God’s embodiment in the incarnation and crucifixion of Christ. In Holy Matter, Sara Ritchey offers a fresh narrative explaining theological and devotional change by journeying beyond the human body to ask how religious men and women understood the effects of God’s incarnation on the natural, material world. She finds a remarkable willingness on the part of medieval Christians to embrace the material world—its trees, flowers, vines, its worms and wolves—as a locus for divine encounter. Early signs that perceptions of the material world were shifting can be seen in reformed communities of religious women in the twelfth-century Rhineland. Here Ritchey finds that, in response to the constraints of gendered regulations and spiritual ideals, women created new identities as virgins who, like the mother of Christ, impelled the world’s re-creation—their notion of the world’s re-creation held that God created the world a second time when Christ was born. In this second act of creation God was seen to be present in the physical world, thus making matter holy. Ritchey then traces the diffusion of this new religious doctrine beyond the Rhineland, showing the profound impact it had on both women and men in professed religious life, especially Franciscans in Italy and Carthusians in England. Drawing on a wide range of sources including art, liturgy, prayer, poetry, meditative guides, and treatises of spiritual instruction, Holy Matter reveals an important transformation in late medieval devotional practice, a shift from metaphor to material, from gazing on images of a God made visible in the splendor of natural beauty to looking at the natural world itself, and finding there God’s presence and promise of salvation.

This book reconstructs the role of midwives in medieval to early modern Islamic history through a careful reading of a wide range of classical and medieval Arabic sources. The author casts the midwife's social status in premodern Islam as a privileged position from which she could mediate between male authority in patriarchal society and female reproductive power within the family. This study also takes a broader historical view of midwifery in the Middle East by examining the tensions between learned medicine (male) and popular, medico-religious practices (female) from early Islam into the Ottoman period and addressing the confrontation between traditional midwifery and Western obstetrics in the first half of the nineteenth century.

This unique and comprehensive title offers state-of-the-art guidance on all of the clinical principles and practices needed in providing optimal health and well-being services for college students. Designed for college health professionals and administrators, this highly practical title is comprised of 24 chapters organized in three sections: Common Clinical Problems in College Health, Organizational and Administrative Considerations for College Health, and Population and Public Health Management on a College Campus. Section I topics include travel health services, tuberculosis, eating disorders in college health, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder among college students, along with several other chapters. Subsequent chapters in Section II then delve into topics such as supporting the health and well-being of a diverse student population, student veterans, health science students, student safety in the clinical setting, and campus management of infectious disease outbreaks, among other topics. The book concludes with organizational considerations such as unique issues in the practice of medicine in the institutional context, situating healthcare within the broader context of wellness on campus, organizational structures of student health, funding student health services, and delivery of innovative healthcare services in college health. Developed by a renowned, multidisciplinary authorship of leaders in college health theory and practice, and coinciding with the founding of the American College Health Association 100 years ago, Principles and Practice of College Health will be of great interest to college health and well-being professionals as well as college administrators.