Includes bibliographical references and index.

Front Matter -- Copyright page -- Navigating the Ocean of Tibetan Medical Literature / William A. McGrath -- A Note on Transcription, Transliteration, and Bibliography -- Figures -- Contributors -- The Vicissitudes of Meaning in Context -- A New Sense of (Dark) Humor in Tibet: Brown Phlegm and Black Bile / Henk Blezer -- A Preliminary Study on the Biography of Yutok Yönten Gönpo the Elder: Reflections on the Origins of Tibetan Medicine / Yang Ga -- “Secret Medicine” in the Writings of Sanggyé Gyatso: the Encoded Esoteric Material of Therapeutics / Tony Chui -- Visceral Anatomy as Depicted in Tibetan Medicine / Katharina Sabernig -- The Modern Biomedical Conception of Cancer and Its Many Potential Correlates in the Tibetan Medical Tradition / Tawni Tidwell -- Medicine and Religion in Context -- The Nine-Fold Magical Cord Cycle: Investigating ’Phrul gyi the gu brgu skor, a Wartime Medical Manual / Tsering Samdrup -- Knowledge, Imagery, and the Treatment of Communicable Disease in the Vase of the Amṛta of Immortality: A Preliminary Analysis of a Nyingma Medical Corpus / Carmen Simioli -- Tantric Divination and Empirical Diagnosis: a Genealogy of Channel Prasenā Rituals in the Tibetan Medical Tradition / William A. McGrath -- Madness and the Spirits: Examining the Role of Spirits in Mental Illness in the Tibetan Communities of Darjeeling / Susannah Deane -- Material Presentations and Cultural Drug Translations of Contemporary Tibetan Precious Pills / Barbara Gerke -- Back Matter -- Index.

Knowledge and Context in Tibetan Medicine is a collection of ten essays in which a team of international scholars describe and interpret Tibetan medical knowledge. With subjects ranging from the relationship between Tibetan and Greco-Arab conceptions of the bodily humors, to the rebranding of Tibetan precious pills for cross-cultural consumption in the People’s Republic of China, each chapter explores representations and transformations of medical concepts across different historical, cultural, and/or intellectual contexts. Taken together this volume offers new perspectives on both well-known Tibetan medical texts and previously unstudied sources, blazing new trails and expanding the scope of the academic study of Tibetan medicine. Contributors include: Henk W.A. Blezer, Yang Ga, Tony Chui, Katharina Sabernig, Tawni Tidwell, Tsering Samdrup, Carmen Simioli, William A. McGrath, Susannah Deane and Barbara Gerke