Sarawak State Library -

Doctors and Healers

Call no.: : 610.1 NAT
Author: : by Tobie Nathan, Isabelle Stengers
Contributor: : Lilian Baun Pulo
Summary: In this book, enthnopsychiatrist Tobie Natan and philosopher Isabelle Stengers argue that this commonly posed opposition between traditional and modern medicine is misleading, they show instead that healers are interesting precisely than diagnosis. Healers construct genuine therapeutic strategies by identifying the origins of symptoms in external forces, outside of the mind of the sufferer. Modern medicine, for its part, is characterized by empiricism rather than rationality. What appears to be the pursuit of rationality is ultimately only a means to dismiss and exclude other forms of treatment. Blurring the distinctions between traditional and modern practices and drawing on perspectives from across the globe, this ethnopsychiatric manifesto encourages us to think in radically new ways about illness, challenging accepted notions on the relationship between sufferer and symptom.