ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the regulation of alternative and traditional medicine, in order to reflect on how particular temporalities shape, and are shaped by, the interface between law and medicine. It argues that both biomedicine and law have relied on a particular sense of 'modernity' as a linear temporal process; in turn, this has been key in developing both crude, and more subtle, social patterns of power, dominance, and exclusion that continue to impact on contemporary societies. The chapter suggests that as law increasingly engages in the regulation of other types of medicine, it continues to emulate biomedical models and assumptions as to what 'modern medicine' should look like, including its temporal features. It explains the large investigation of the multiple ways in which traditional and alternative medicines apprehend and are apprehended by law in several states in Europe and Africa. European states actively and through both legal and practical interventions rewrote what they saw as 'forward-thinking' or 'modern' medicine.
