Making Sense of Health, Disease, and the Environment in Cross-Cultural History: The Arabic-Islamic World, China, Europe, and North America

Abstract

As the title suggests, this edited volume covers an array of areas: geographically, thematically, and temporally. The strength of such an ambitious volume is that it allows for readers to gain a sense of how pervasive notions of health and the environment have shaped societies throughout all human history and cultures. With the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, this volume seems all the more prescient in showcasing that the construction of knowledge around any disease or conception of health is rarely separated from the cultural and political approaches to understanding the environment. At the core of Making Sense, the authors ask how has humankind “observed, imagined, and conceptualized the links between the environment and health” (2). Taking a non-Eurocentric approach to this history ensures that what is understood as “health,” “disease,” and the “environment” is fluid, and thus the term “milieu” is employed to evoke the various conditions that give rise to particular meanings of health and disease. In order to support their method, the volume is structured into four parts, with the first two focusing on “Observations, Definitions, and Theories about Environment, Disease, and the Body” and the subsequent two tackle what is “Healthy or Unhealthy Environments.” The three chapters in Part I highlight “the universality of the conviction of the interdependency between natural milieus, humans, other living beings, and health” (11) by looking at medieval European, medieval Arab, and Han Chinese scholars. While the reasons for this conviction vary from context to context, this opening section frames for the reader the shared beliefs in pre-modern cultures toward health and the environment. Ahmed Aarab, Kaouthar Lamouchi-Chebbi, and Mehrnaz Katouzian-Safadi’s essay (Chapter 3) examining the writings of eight and ninth century scholar, Gahiz, highlighted the multiple avenues in which information was