Needles Herbs Gods and Ghosts or 64 Ways to Beat the Blues

Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1848

Author: Linda L Barnes

When did the West discover Chinese healing traditions? Most people might point to the "rediscovery" of Chinese acupuncture in the 1970s. In Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts, Linda Barnes leads us back, instead, to the thirteenth century to uncover the story of the West's earliest known encounters with Chinese understandings of illness and healing. As Westerners struggled to understand new peoples unfamiliar to them, how did they make sense of equally unfamiliar concepts and practices of healing? Barnes traces this story through the mid-nineteenth century, in both Europe and, eventually, the United States. She has unearthed numerous examples of Western missionaries, merchants, diplomats, and physicians in China, Europe, and America encountering and interpreting both Chinese people and their healing practices, and sometimes adopting their own versions of these practices.

A medical anthropologist with a degree in comparative religion, Barnes illuminates the way constructions of medicine, religion, race, and the body informed Westerners' understanding of the Chinese and their healing traditions.

Go to: Principles of Microeconomics or The Psychology of Economic Decisions Volume 2

64 Ways to Beat the Blues

Author: Yolanda Nav

You're low. Really low. Haven't gotten off the couch all weekend. Stopped returning phone calls. It feels like the sun will never shine again, and you're living on chocolate and bad TV. There's Prozac, of course, but who can be bothered going to the doctor? What you need is immediate help. You need cheering up. And here it is.

Clever, witty, full of comfort and sympathy, 64 Ways to Beat the Blues offers instantaneous relief through the gift of laughter. Written and illustrated in full-color by Yolanda Nave--author of Breaking Up and Welcome to Our Company, together with 314,000 copies in print--it's a been-there, done-that guide to getting out of the dumps and getting on with your life. Try a pet--and watch him eat your rug. Phone a friend--though not one living in Paris while you're stuck in a snowstorm. Take in a funny movie--if you can stop crying long enough to laugh. Go shopping (and pretend you're not already wearing the push-up bra), find a good shrink (who won't fall asleep), or buy a brand new car (and tick off each payment). The situations are instantly recognizable, and whether the blues are seasonal, occupational, hormonal, or matrimonial, Yolanda Nave knows what it takes to laugh them away.