Planet Medicine: Origins [Paperback]

Richard Grossinger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 3, 1995

Planet Medicine is a major work by an anthropologist who looks at medicine in a broad context. In this edition, additions to this classic text include a section on Reiki, a comparison of types of palpation used in healing, updates on craniosacral therapy, and a means of understanding how different alternative medicines actually work. Illustrated throughout, this is the standard on the history, philosophy, and anthropology of this subject.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Every chapter challenges countercultural cliches and assumtions while revealing a deep sympathy for—and the necessity for—alternative modes of healing. This book provides a comprehensive philosophical and historical overview of healing throughout the planet."
—New Age Journal

"A remarkable book that looks at not only the history of medicine but the deeper anthropological and psychocultural roots of the ideas of healing that have appeared all across human history. In both its factual and speculative content it is brilliant and original..."
—Richard Grossman

"In this brilliant and original book, healing is taken from its contemporary limited definition into the universal realm of humanity's primary knowledge, bridging cultural and metaphysical assumptions about the meaning of disease and cure. From Stone Age shamanism to post-industrial medicine, Grossinger, an anthropologist, leads us through a dazzling, erudite account of the beginning concepts of medicine, healing, and cultural beliefs about disease."
—Irene Alleger, Townsend Letter for Doctors --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

Richard Grossinger was born in New York City in 1944. He received a B.A. from Amherst College in 1966 and a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan in 1975. He is the author of many books, including The Night Sky, Embryogenesis, and Homeopathy: An Introduction for Skeptics and Beginners. He lives with his wife Lindy Hough in Berkeley, California. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 612 pages
• Publisher: North Atlantic Books; 6th edition (October 3, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556431791
• ISBN-13: 978-1556431791
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,875,834 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I have the 1990 edition of this book, September 24, 2000

By 

. (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Planet Medicine, Revised Edition: Origins (Paperback)

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.

11 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What is medicine?, July 6, 2000

By 

Rodney Torres - See all my reviews

This review is from: Planet Medicine: Origins (Paperback)

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.

4 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Origins? Oh, please., March 19, 2007

By 

V. Charm (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Planet Medicine, Revised Edition: Origins (Paperback)

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.