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The authors provide a new insight to the practice of medical care in the medieval world. They examine the medicinal prescriptions and references to materia medica of the Cairo Genizah by combining the approaches of ethnobotany and history of medicine.

In the early 14th century, a court nutritionist called Hu Sihui wrote his Yinshan Zhengyao, a dietary and nutritional manual for the Chinese Mongol Empire. Hu Sihui, a man apparently with a Turkic linguistic background, included recipes, descriptions of food items, and dietary medical lore including selections from ancient texts, and thus reveals to us the full extent of an amazing cross-cultural dietary; here recipes can be found from as far as Arabia, Iran, India and elsewhere, next to those of course from Mongolia and China. Although the medical theories are largely Chinese, they clearly show Near Eastern and Central Asian influence.

In Mamluks and Animals: Veterinary Medicine in Medieval Islam Housni Alkhateeb Shehada offers the first comprehensive study of veterinary medicine, its practitioners and its patients in the medieval Islamic world, with special emphasis on the Mamluk period (1250-1517).

This volume rethinks the role of the Sino-Japanese medical classics during the early modern period in light of antiquarianism, languages, and medical philology. Philology in particular allows the authors to address the changing meaning of the same term, which often reflected well-known metaphors in the source language that were transposed to the target language. Each essay touches on the reliability of received medical texts and their modern fate.

Transforming the Void: Embryological Discourse and Reproductive Imagery in East Asian Religions provides new insight into how the body's generative processes are harnessed as powerful metaphors for spiritual attainment in the religious traditions of China and Japan.