ABSTRACT
Modern medicine having emerged and developed principally in the Western world, its development beyond this region has not received due scholarship attention from historians. The history of medicine in non-Western countries has instead focused on indigenous traditions, such as Islamic, Indian or Chinese medicine,1 and when it comes to modern medicine, it is viewed as a phenomenon external to the native ‘systems’ despite of its presence and influence in these countries for more than a century. Even the evolution of these non-Western medical ‘systems’ that has involved, at least to some extent, the assimilation of modern Western concepts or techniques, is conceived as aimed at strengthening their own ontological entity. For example, the assimilation of biomedicine by Ayurvedic and Unâni medicines in India, was, and still is, considered as a means of saving them from demise, or preserving their ‘indianness’.2 Even those recent studies that have underlined the plurality of biomedicine or alternative medicine still lay emphasis on the fundamental differences between the former and the latter in terms of worldview or perception of the body.3
