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Dear Pierce,
While I have no personal experience with traditional Burmese medicine, I have in the past spoken with Sri Lankan Ayurvedic physicians who have spent time in Burma. However, this was almost 20 years ago, and much has changed in Burma since then. What the Sri Lankans said at the time was that due to commonalities such as Theravada Buddhism, there has been exchange between both cultures for years, if not centuries. As in Sri Lanka, in agreement with Scott's message, Ayurveda takes on and subsumes, and is itself informed by, local practices, beliefs, and epistemologies. Given the situation in Burma, perhaps your best access to information, save individual Burmese, would come through Sri Lankan or Thai sources.
I hope this has been helpful.
Best,
James Battle
UC Berkeley/UC San Francisco
Joint Medical
Anthropology Program
scott bamber <sbamber@...> wrote:
Hello Pierce Salguero,Its not clear from your question whether you mean traditional Burmese medicine, or medicine in general. However, at the time I did my own research on Thai traditional medicine, some years back, I also searched for information on Burmese traditional medicine. Based on that search, as far as I'm aware there are no bibiographies available on Burmese traditional medicine, and very few sources of information. Hopefully the situation may have changed in the interim. The best I can offer at present is the following:1. A description in Shway Yoe's The Burman (pp 413-426) that includes references to the four elements theory, the role of belief in spirits, sympathetic magic and reference to the large number of ingredients in traditional prescriptions.2. A reference to treatment of illness in the work by Sangermano (1893, pp. 166-174).3. I also believe there is a collection of traditional Burmese medical texts in the National Library, Rangoon (Yangon). I'm not sure whether anyone has done any work based on these.Unfortunately I don't have additional details of the publications mentioned above, but nevertheless hope that this will be of some help.Regards,Scott BamberBangkok
On Aug 23, 2007, at 7:41 AM, Pierce Salguero wrote:
Hello,
Does anyone have any bibliographies or sources of information on Burmese medicine?
Thanks!
Pierce Salguero
Institute of History of Medicine
Johns Hopkins University
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