Medicine and Memory in Tibet

Open-access edition: DOI 10.6069/9780295743004
Only fifty years ago, Tibetan medicine, now seen in China as a vibrant aspect of Tibetan culture, was considered a feudal vestige to be eliminated through government-led social transformation. Medicine and Memory in Tibet examines medical revivalism on the geographic and sociopolitical margins both of China and of Tibet's medical establishment in Lhasa, exploring the work of medical practitioners, or amchi, and of Medical Houses in the west-central region of Tsang.
Due to difficult research access and the power of state institutions in the writing of history, the perspectives of more marginal amchi have been absent from most accounts of Tibetan medicine. Theresia Hofer breaks new ground both theoretically and ethnographically, in ways that would be impossible in today's more restrictive political climate that severely limits access for researchers. She illuminates how medical practitioners safeguarded their professional heritage through great adversity and personal hardship.

Theresia Hofer is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Community Medicine at the University of Oslo. She received her PhD in medical history and medical anthropology from University College London in 2011, and is the author of The Inheritance of Change: Transmission and Practice in Tibetan Medicine in Ngamring (Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde, University of Vienna, 2012) and the editor of Bodies in Balance: The Art of Tibetan Medicine (Rubin Museum of Art and University of Washington Press, 2014).