Planet Medicine, Revised Edition: Origins (ISBN 1556433697)

What is medicine?:
The broadest and deepest revealing I've seen of what medicine is and how we as a species have come to practice healing arts and sciences, taking into consideration the entire repertoire of knowing we currently employ and do not (universally) employ - the rational and the pre or post or non-rational modes of knowing, at times called empiricism. This book has engaged me in not just its subject matter, but has invoked in me a reassessment of what I am doing with my life, and what I should be doing with my life. An ever present undertow of the text is the sustained consideration of what it means to be conscious and to participate in the various modes of either being the recipient of or initiator of (or both) an attempt to mitigate and come to terms with not just experiencing and trying to `get rid of' disease but trying to know what this is, what it portends, what it does not portend, and what this means and may have meant for various cultures present and past. It, immersing itself in & examining the broadest range of ideologies of healing, embraces no single one nor abandons any of them. Essential reading for an assessment of not just what medicine or healing is (& what we might agree are the differences between our current commodizized notion of what medicine is as against what healing might be given our notion of what medicine is) but also a detailed examination of how we come to consider what medicine is (& is not). At times poetic, the prose never succumbs to a pre-packaged conceptual terminology, oftentimes riddled with assumptions and steeped in an end-product paradigm, which itself is in need of genealogical elucidation. With the widest casting of critically perspicacious (meta) scholarship, this volume serves to conceptualize in the widest breadth of taxonomic epistemologies how we have come to practice a multitude of medicinal strategies and what these strategies are within and without these same systems of taxonomic modes of knowing; firmly establishing, at least for me, that rational, linguistic frameworks of knowledge, do not preclude, and are not precluded by, empirical `alternate' experiential constellations of knowing and engaging health and illness. A consistently compassionate but nevertheless unrelenting examination of Planetary Medicine, this volume gives us a rather high bird's eye view of the at least 5 million year old human practice of coming to know & practice medicine, and how we can perhaps come to be (like?) birds too in our quest for knowing.

I have the 1990 edition of this book:
For the broadest overview of healing methods throughout the world and history, this book is well footnoted, and more entertaining than books this educational usually are.

Origins? Oh, please.:
This author has one heck of a writing style. It's all over the place! He appears to be a well informed guy, but he's very hard to follow. He uses lots of dashes, parentheses, and notes about other chapters. Plus, there are many overuses of words such as "insofar" and "per se," which disrupt the entire flow of reading. It is not what I expected at all and am pretty disappointed.