Trade and famine in classical antiquity

All three books, two written in the United States and one in France, demonstrate that valid cures can be obtained by means quite different from Western medicine in its present state, that anatomy and disease entities do not have to be the be-all and end-all of medical investigation, and that a system of functions and relationships between energies also seems to work. However, two of the writers have a Chinese background and the third was trained in Macao. Unless one's thinking is based on the Chinese way of seeing the world, the philosophy of yin and yang, and the Tao which will turn each thing into its opposite in due course, one can hardly hope to practise this type of medicine successfully. Marianne Winder Wellcome Institute