Description :

The many scientists that gathered in Genoa for the 3rd European colloquium on Ethnofarmacology and the 1st International Conference of Anthropology and History of Health and Disease (active in a variety of cultural areas, such as medicine, pharmacology, anthropology, botany, ethnology, history, philology, sociology, psychology, geography, philosophy and the like), gave an up-to-date eclectique and « polyphonic » picture of the most recent developments in the various disciplines with regard to the subjects proposed. The latter were particularly vast, and not by chance : in the near future, in fact, the health-care strategies of the different populations are bound to become an essential heritage common to the whole world.
The speeches collected in this volume are unified under the same interest for a phenomenon that, in the present multi-ethnic societies, in really important : what happens when two different medicines (or better two different visions of the world) meet each other. The place of meeting can be institutional (in medical legislation for example) or physical (the body of a patient for example) ; the actors can have very different roles ; the meeting itself can be traumatic or smooth, constructive or aggressive ; anyway, a changing occurs in the inside of both paradigms and this needs to be understood and explained.