Today I sit down for an in-depth conversation with my good friend, Michael Stanley-Baker, a scholar of Chinese religion and medicine. We talk about Mike’s international childhood and how his family history influenced his intellectual life, his training as a Chinese medical practitioner, and his book co-edited with Vivienne Lo, the Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2022), which is groundbreaking... and open access! We also talk about Mike’s new book with Manchester University Press, Situating Religion and Medicine in Asia, which opens up a critical conversation about how we understand Asian medicine. Then, we look ahead to Mike’s digital humanities project, called Polyglot Asian Medicines. Along the way we talk rabbit-ducks and how fish know that they're underwater.
I hope that you enjoy the conversation as much as I did. And if you want to hear from more experts on Buddhist medicine and related topics, subscribe to Blue Beryl for monthly episodes.
Resources mentioned in the episode:


Michael Stanley-Baker and Vivienne Lo (eds), Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine (2022). Available open access here. 

Michael Stanley-Baker, Situating Religion and Medicine in Asia: Methodological Insights and Innovations (2023).

The Rabbit-Duck (image)

Polyglot Asian Medicines project website

Polyglot Asian Medicines intro video

Mike's publications


Dr. Pierce Salguero is a transdisciplinary scholar of health humanities who is fascinated by historical and contemporary intersections between Buddhism, medicine, and crosscultural exchange. He has a Ph.D. in History of Medicine from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine (2010), and teaches Asian history, medicine, and religion at Penn State University’s Abington College, located near Philadelphia.
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