Preface

Summary

The idea for this volume began taking shape during the preparation for the session on traditional and modern medicine, which was one of the sessions organized by the Research Committee on Medical Sociology (now Sociology of Health) of the International Sociological Association (ISA) as part of the Xlth World Congress of Sociology held in New Delhi in August 1984. I was invited by the Chairman of the Committee, Ray Elling, to organize that session. Three of the papers presented in the session, namely, the paper on Hong Kong, Sonoda's paper on Japan, and the paper on China, were selected for inclusion in this volume. They appear here, revised and enlarged, as Chapters 5, 3, and 2, respectively. Their contributors, Ranee Lee, Yuet-wah Cheung, Kyoichi Sonoda, and Li Jing-wei, had worked extensively on the study of medical systems from different perspectives and were specially invited to participate in the ISA Congress. For the other chapters, I approached Tsunetsugu Munakata from Japan and Santhat Sermsri of Thailand, prompted by their valuable contributions to the study of medical systems in their respective countries. Sonoda's chapter provides an overview of the link between traditional and modern medicine in Japan while Munakata centres on the more specific area of mental health, which is a very relevant aspect in the high-technology and rapid pace of life in Japan in the 1980s. One of the main contributions of this book is that it offers the views of social scientists from the countries studied. Of course, we paid the price in terms of time. Indeed, as is common in collaborative efforts, the bulk of the revision work was done by correspondence. However, in the spring of 1988, I had the opportunity to go to Beijing to finalize the chapter on China.

The main aim of this study is to present current documentation on the resilience of the traditional medicine system in Asian nations undergoing rapid modernization and to explore the reasons for people's persistent combination of modern and traditional medical resources in their everyday life.