ABSTRACT
If the past is a ‘foreign country’, it might be as well for historians to engage with that past like social anthropologists approaching another culture. Since Charles Leslie first published his methodological suggestions for analysing non-Western medical systems in 1976, anthropologists have generally accepted that Western orthodoxy should not be the centre against which non-Western medical systems are judged,7 thus providing the intellectual space for examining Asian medical
systems on their own terms. The anthropological analysis of plural medicines could now proceed without the burden of discussing whether they were efficacious, or more or less superior to their Western counterpart.
