Ayurveda or "the sacred knowledge of longevity" has been practiced in India and many Asian countries since time immemorial. Interest in Ayurveda started growing all over the world in the late 1970s, following the Alma Ata Declaration adopted by the W.H.O. in 1978. Ayurveda in the New Millennium: Emerging Roles and Future Challenges attempts to survey the progress made in this field and to formulate a course of action to take Ayurveda through the new millennium. It also identifies the many stumbling blocks that need to be removed if Ayurveda is to cater to the needs of a wider audience. Features: Newer insights into the history of Ayurveda Regulatory aspects of the manufacture of ayurvedic medicines Industrial production of traditional ayurvedic medicines Quality control The scientific rationale of single herb therapy Biological effects of ayurvedic formulations Optimization of ancient wisdom and newer knowledge Conservation of threatened herbs Nutraceuticals and cosmeceuticals from Ayurveda Critical view of Ayurveda in the West Direction for the Ayurveda renaissance Ayurveda in the New Millennium: Emerging Roles and Future Challenges describes the strength of Ayurveda and how to usher in the Ayurveda renaissance. This book will be of interest to proponents of Ayurveda and all branches of traditional and alternative medicine. Experts from the fields of medicine, pharmacology, new drug discovery and food technology will also find it useful.

Timeline that spans the history of medicine, from the prehistoric trepanning of skulls to modern microsurgery.

Who wore the first pants? Who painted the first masterpiece? Who first rode the horse? Who invented soap? This madcap adventure across ancient history uses everything from modern genetics to archaeology to uncover the geniuses behind these and other world-changing innovations. Who invented the wheel? Who told the first joke? Who drank the first beer? Who was the murderer in the first murder mystery, who was the first surgeon, who sparked the first fire--and most critically, who was the first to brave the slimy, pale oyster? In this book, writer Cody Cassidy digs deep into the latest research to uncover the untold stories of some of these incredible innovators (or participants in lucky accidents). With a sharp sense of humor and boundless enthusiasm for the wonders of our ancient ancestors, Who Ate the First Oyster? profiles the perpetrators of the greatest firsts and catastrophes of prehistory, using the lives of individuals to provide a glimpse into ancient cultures, show how and why these critical developments occurred, and educate us on a period of time that until recently we've known almost nothing about.

This is a fascinating account of surgery that throws light on forgotten and unknown aspects of its practice from antiquity to the present. It illuminates the rare periods of progress and also explains why there were lengthy times when no original operations were undertaken. Maybury has achieved this by identifying the time and place when each operation was first undertaken. The first of these was the trephination of the skull in Peru twelve thousand years ago, presumably to exorcise evil spirits. This operation over several thousand years reached Europe where Hippocrates described and rationalised it to treat head injuries, it is still practiced today and is the forerunner of each subsequent original operation. The golden ages of surgery took place in Ancient Greece and India and 1,300 years later in Western Europe and the USA. Between these periods, no original operations took place. Maybury explains why this happened and reveals the Greek theory that dominated surgery for over 2,000 years. He describes the passage and translation of the Greek manuscripts and their acceptance in the Arabian Empires and how in turn the Arabic versions strongly influenced Italy and then Western Europe. He also tells of the Edict of Tours of 1163 that devastated surgery and took 700 years to rectify and also the extraordinary modern era when all the tissues of the body were finally operated upon and very much more.

This book examines the philosophies of nature of the early Greek thinkers and argues that a significant and thoroughgoing shift is required in our understanding of them. In contrast with the natural world of the earliest Greek literature, often the result of arbitrary divine causation, in the work of early Ionian philosophers we see the idea of a cosmos: ordered worlds where there is complete regularity. How was this order generated and maintained and what underpinned those regularities? What analogies or models were used for the order of the cosmos? What did they think about causation and explanatory structure? How did they frame natural laws? Andrew Gregory draws on recent work on mechanistic philosophy and its history, on the historiography of the relation of science to art, religion and magic, and on the fragments and doxography of the early Greek thinkers to argue that there has been a tendency to overestimate the extent to which these early Greek philosophies of nature can be described as 'mechanistic'. We have underestimated how far they were committed to other modes of explanation and ontologies, and we have underestimated, underappreciated and indeed underexplored how plausible and good these philosophies would have been in context.

This book examines the relationship between magic, philosophy and the investigation of nature in presocratic Greece. Did the presocratic thinkers, often praised for their rejection of the supernatural, still believe in gods and the divine and the efficacy of magical practices? Did they use animism, astrology, numerology and mysticism in their explanations of the world? This book analyses the evidence in detail and argues that we need to look at each of these beliefs in context.