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Well-Mannered Medicine: Medical Ethics and Etiquette in Classical Ayurveda

Online ISBN:
9780199950560
Print ISBN:
9780199856268
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Well-Mannered Medicine: Medical Ethics and Etiquette in Classical Ayurveda

Dagmar Wujastyk
Dagmar Wujastyk

PhD in Indology 2010

Bonn University
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Published online:
20 September 2012
Published in print:
2 August 2012
Online ISBN:
9780199950560
Print ISBN:
9780199856268
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

When is it right for a doctor to lie to a patient? What is more important: a patient's health, or his dignity? When should a patient refuse to follow the doctor's orders? What is acceptable medical risk? Whose fault is it if a patient dies under a doctor's care? Who cares for the patient? And who pays the bill? About two thousand years ago, physicians in ancient India could find answers to these questions in the then new, and now classic ayurvedic textbooks. Held in great respect, and used for ayurvedic training even today, the early ayurvedic treatises offer many guidelines on good medical practice: They define what made a physician a good physician, or a patient a good patient. They describe the formal procedures of medical education and lay out the rules for subsequent practice. They determine the duties or obligations doctors and patients had to each other, providing a catalogue of rules of professional conduct that physicians were bound to, including guidelines on appropriate interactions both with patients as well as with colleagues. Translating and discussing the original Sanskrit texts of the core ayurvedic treatises, the book offers a survey and analysis of the ayurvedic moral discourses on professional conduct in a medical setting and explores in what relationship the ethical tenets found in the ayurvedic works stand to those from other broadly contemporaneous South Asian sources.

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