Description

In Thailand today, traditional folk medicine competes successfully with Western hospital-based medicine, and represents a popular approach to healing even in modern cities such as Bangkok. This book offers a broad-brush history of medicine in Thailand from the 3rd millennium BC to the present. It traces this rich cultural heritage from its origins in Buddhism, animism and Ayurveda to its contemporary application in both rural and urban Thailand. The author spent eight years in field study and academic research on traditional Thai Medicine.Paperback: 142 pagesPublisher: Hohm Press; 1 edition (July 1, 2007)Language: EnglishISBN-10: 1890772674ISBN-13: 978-1890772673A one page review of Dr. Salguero’s Book: Traditional Thai Medicine January 20, 2011By Brad BurlingI selected this book based primarily on seeking out a more recent copyright dated publication on Thai medicine and with hope that the author would present both a historical and a more recent perspective on how this medical tradition has survived in a world that more often embraces Western convention. The author, C. Peirce Salguero, earned his M.A. in East Asian Studies at the University of Virginia in 2005 and wrote his thesis on the cultural history of Thai medicine. Subsequently, he had his thesis published as this handbook I’m reviewing.I liked the book very much. Although it was originally written for the author to attain his M.A., he did an elegant job of packing in a lot of information within a limited number of pages and did it with a personal and rather humble style of writing that would appeal to the masses and not just those people who are academically minded.Just the same, a point of which both pleased and concerned me was that he gleaned both his modern and traditional impressions of Thai medicine primarily through his experiences at the Shivagakomarpaj Traditional Medicine Hospital in Chiang Mai. Of the four years between 1997 and 2001, he spent a little over two years of his time in Thailand at this hospital, training as a practitioner and teacher of Traditional Thai Medicine (TTM). This hospital, considered one of the most prestigious traditional medical training centers in Northern Thailand, is both a government-licensed school and a community clinic that provides free traditional health-care to the local villages. Although it conveniently provides him with a `one-stop-shop’ to gain insight into both modern and traditional influences in medical practice, it is equally limiting to what the school interprets as traditional practices. Dr. Salguero (note: he just received his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 2010), even admits that delivering the second part of his handbook’s perspective on traditional practices can be dangerous when coming from a single school. Thus, he defends his writing as generalizations and further states that “it can in broad outline be considered a representative example of an institution with TTM tradition.” I would have liked to read that he spent as much or more time dedicated to the town villages and the non-literate, non-government influenced practices of the local folk and hill-tribe people. To his credit, I must confess, he does admit that in order to incorporate the folk-practices into his handbook, he relied on his ethnographic observations. That gives his “traditional” medicine theme some increased credibility, in my opinion.A book entitled “Traditional Thai Medicine” carries with it the heavy burden of delivering a comprehensive summary of medical history, existing folk practices, and modern practice influences. That’s a lot for someone to tackle with only four years of undergrad at UVa and living in Asia for only four years following, let alone a local scholar with a lifetime of exposure and experiences. It’s a book that a person visiting Thailand and interested in medicine could read in less time than it takes to travel from California to Bangkok and small enough to stuff in your satchel for future reference during your stay.Please contribute back by OCRing and Spellcheck/Proofreading this book. I recommend ABBYY Finereader 10 or 11 for doing this work in a relatively easy way.If you plan to do that please leave a comment here so the effort won’t be duplicated by others. Please post back the final pdf and I’d also appreciate the project files as well (please PM if you do).Please note that the high quality scan images are posted here for a specific purpose – to make it easy to OCR/spellcheck the book and not spend 100 hours doing that from a crappy, lossy compressed pdfs that are sometimes posted here. so please don’t waste your time asking why this is not a pdf file. Instead contribute a few hours and OCR/proofread the posted book. Thank you.