The science of regenerative medicine is arguably older than transplantation—the first major textbook was published in 1901—and a major regenerative medicine meeting took place in 1988, three years before the first Banff transplant pathology meeting. However, the subject of regenerative medicine/tissue engineering pathology has never received focused attention. Defining and classifying tissue engineering pathology is long overdue. In the next decades, the field of transplantation will enlarge at least tenfold, through a hybrid of tissue engineering combined with existing approaches to lessening the organ shortage. Gradually, transplantation pathologists will become tissue‐(re‐) engineering pathologists with enhanced skill sets to address concerns involving the use of bioengineered organs. We outline ways of categorizing abnormalities in tissue‐engineered organs through traditional light microscopy or other modalities including biomarkers. We propose creating a new Banff classification of tissue engineering pathology to standardize and assess de novo bioengineered solid organs transplantable success in vivo. We recommend constructing a framework for a classification of tissue engineering pathology now with interdisciplinary consensus discussions to further develop and finalize the classification at future Banff Transplant Pathology meetings, in collaboration with the human cell atlas project. A possible nosology of pathologic abnormalities in tissue‐engineered organs is suggested.
For over 5,000 years, the region now known as India has held a rich reservoir of medical systems, each providing distinct orientations towards illness experience, aetiology, cure and prevention. Since the turn of the twentieth century, there has been a considerable rise in the cultural recontextualisation of European and North American medical traditions in South Asia. With a focus on the guiding concepts of vitality, self-healing and ecology, this article maps the transnational trajectories of naturopathy across three sites: its instantiation into the United States’ early 1900s cultural climate of health epidemics and industrialisation; its rearticulation into the context of Gandhian anti-colonial movements in India; and its transformation into a mode of asserting public health and environmental advocacy in contemporary India. After tracing the trajectory of naturopathic thought, this article will provide a practitioner profile of naturopathy Dr Jacob Vadakkanchery as well as a framing of his politicised response to the 2018 floods in Kerala, south India. This particular examination serves as a microcosm of a larger trend: contemporary practitioners in India overtly re-frame naturopathic concepts in relation to immanent environmental and public health concerns.
This article examines the circulation of humanitarian ideas, materials, and actions in a non‐biomedical and non‐Judeo–Christian context: Sowa Rigpa or Tibetan medical camps in India and Nepal. Through these camps, practitioners and patients alike often overtly articulate Sowa Rigpa medicine as part of a broader humanitarian “good” motivated by a Buddhist‐inflected ethics of compassion and a moral economy of care, diverging from mainstream public health and conventional humanitarian projects. Three ethnographic case studies demonstrate how micro‐political interactions at camps engage with ethical and religious imaginaries. We show how the ordinary ethics of Sowa Rigpa humanitarianism gain distinct political meaning in contrast to non‐Tibetan forms of aid, reconfiguring the relationship between Buddhism, essential medicines, moral economies, and politics. While Sowa Rigpa as a medical system operates transnationally, these camps are organized around local logics of emergent care, employing narratives of “charity” and Buddhist compassion when addressing health needs.
This opening piece introduces the eight articles in this special issue of Asian Medicine, all of which emerged out of the daylong Science, Technology, and Medicine in South Asia Symposium: Medicine and Memory, at the 2018 Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsin. These articles are concerned with the ways in which time and healing entangle across regions and healing traditions in South Asia, including Unani, Ayurveda, Naturopathy, and biomedicine. Linking the findings from these articles with recent scholarship, our conversation in the symposium moved beyond the notion of medical pluralisms to a notion of dynamic plurals, through historicizing regional and local diversities in practices and philosophies, often grouped under a single name by communities and practitioners. In an increasingly communalist and politically fractured modern South Asia, we suggest that the discussions in this special issue make a critical contribution to understanding how cultural institutions of knowledge function in society.
In Kerala, South India, individual pursuits of nature cure (prakr̥ti cikitsa) invoke ethical narratives about an idealized purer past, contrasting a dangerous present saturated with social and environmental toxins. While first popularized in India by M. K. Gandhi, nature cure has gained contemporary fame as a low-cost intervention for Kerala’s purported health crisis: chronic lifestyle diseases. Nonprofessionalized natural healers identify as public health activists, teaching predominantly urban, middle-class patients how to revive local lifeways of self-doctorhood. This article narrates how two aging patients internalize their naturopathic doctors’ advice to detoxify and “do nothing” rather than strive for biomedical cure. By naturally revitalizing their bodies, they cultivate feelings of intense independence and ecological attachment that reconfigure experiences of migrated-kin isolation. In counterpoint to literature that frames biopolitical and medical discourses as causally producing moral subjectivities, this article demonstrates how persons agentively craft counternormative, vitalistic models of aging and health, contributing to broader localist imaginaries of reviving pre-toxic lifeways.
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