History of Health and Medicine: A Transcultural Approach explores the history of medicine globally and across time, through thematic perspectives.

This comprehensive textbook overcomes Eurocentrism and Positivistic perspectives by avoiding a chronological perspective and addresses the plurality of original contexts, epistemological foundations, languages, traditions, patients and diseases, methods and instruments, and healing spaces. It includes a gender perspective that pays attention to the great cultures of antiquity, but also to Islamic medicine, colonialism, race, and global health. It addresses psychotherapy and the dominance of technology, health policies and the political use of health, and the construction and domination of bodies. Its cross-cutting perspectives cover intellectual and economic history, demography, and anthropology through the objects and spaces of medical practice, highlighting the importance of illness as a driver of social change and conflict.

The book’s pluralistic approach will be of interest to readers seeking a complex understanding of the role of illness and medicine in all stages of human history.

Josep L. Barona is Professor of History of Science (University of València, Spain). His research has focused on health and nutrition international diplomacy in interwar years; the exile of Spanish republican scientists, and the history of physiology. His recent books include Nutritional Policies and International Diplomacy (2021); and Health Policies in Interwar Europe. A Transnational Perspective (Routledge, 2019).