Prof. Ibata-Arens is a political scientist whose work explores biomedical innovation, entrepreneurship and science and technology policy across Japan, China, India and beyond. Her book Pandemic Medicine: Why the Global Innovation System is Broken and How We Can Fix It examines the business and politics of global health, asking why the current system produces enormous profits for some while failing to deliver equitable access to essential medicines for many.

The conversation begins with Prof. Ibata-Arens’s own journey into the study of medicine, innovation and political economy. She reflects on her experiences as a Japanese American conducting research in Japan, where Kampo and other traditional medicines are integrated into everyday healthcare, and on a life-changing encounter in China with Dr. Liu, a traditional Chinese medicine doctor whose intervention during her husband’s cancer treatment became one of the seeds for Pandemic Medicine.

Together, Michael, Ronit and Kathryn discuss the place of traditional and plant-based medicines in global health, and the ways in which these forms of knowledge are often excluded, undervalued or absorbed into pharmaceutical systems. They explore the role of patents, intellectual property, vaccine nationalism, evergreening and the global innovation system, asking who gets to own medical knowledge and who benefits when healing becomes a source of profit.

The episode also turns to biodiversity, medicinal plants and the future of biopharmaceuticals. Kathryn reflects on the risks of overharvesting, extinction and the loss of traditional medical expertise, while also considering the promise and danger of new technologies such as digital sequence information, biologics and AI-assisted drug discovery.

At the heart of the episode is a question that runs throughout the series: what would it mean to think of medicine not only as an industry, but as a common good? How might scholars, practitioners, policy makers, communities and companies imagine more ethical systems for sharing knowledge, protecting biodiversity and supporting human flourishing?

Subscribe to Medicine and the Healing Arts wherever you get your podcasts for thoughtful conversations with scholars and practitioners on Asian medicine, religion, history, healing and the questions they raise for health today.

Links and resources:

• Medicine and the Healing Arts pillar, MIT Global Humanities: https://comparativeglobalhumanities.mit.edu/pillars/healing-arts-and-human-well-being/

• Prof. Kathryn Ibata-Arens: https://www.kathrynibataarens.com/

• Ibata-Arens, Kathryn C. Pandemic Medicine: Why the Global Innovation System Is Broken, and How We Can Fix It. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2021. https://www.rienner.com/title/Pandemic_Medicine_Why_the_Global_Innovation_System_Is_Broken_and_How_We_Can_Fix_It

• Typology of Innovation System Architectures (TISA) framework: See Pandemic Medicine, Chapter 1.

• Ibata-Arens, Kathryn C. Beyond Technonationalism: Biomedical Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Asia. Stanford University Press, 2019. https://academic.oup.com/stanford-scholarship-online/book/31573

• China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences: https://en.cacms.ac.cn/

• Tu Youyou and the discovery of artemisinin: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2015/tu/facts/

• On the regulation of Kampo medicine in Japan: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25043783/

• Nelson Mandela, South Africa and the 1998 pharmaceutical companies lawsuit: https://msfaccess.org/1998-big-pharma-versus-nelson-mandela

• Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing: https://www.cbd.int/abs

• Max Planck–NTU Centre for Biocultural Worlding: https://ntu.ccasingapore.org/researchs/max-planck-ntu-singapore-centre-for-biocultural-worlding/

Resources available for download on asianmedicinezone.com:

• Diagram showing Typology of Innovation System Architectures (TISA) framework

• Ibata-Arens, Kathryn C. Pandemic Medicine: Why the Global Innovation System Is Broken, and How We Can Fix It. Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2021 (excerpt).

• Ibata-Arens, Kathryn C. Beyond Technonationalism: Biomedical Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Asia. Stanford University Press, 2019 (chapter 1).

Ibata Arens Pandemic Medicine Intro Ch 1 Tisa Framework 1

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Ibata Arens Beyond Technonationalism Biomed Innov In Asia Ch 1 Intro

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Prof. Mukharji is a historian of science and medicine whose work explores how medical traditions are shaped through encounters between people, institutions, technologies, political movements and forms of knowledge. In the conversation, he reflects on his own intellectual trajectory, from growing up in West Bengal and studying in India, to working with David Arnold at SOAS, teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, and returning to India to join Ashoka University.

Together, Michael, Ronit and Projit discuss how we might think about traditional medicine beyond simple oppositions between “modern” and “traditional”, or “Western” and “non-Western”. They explore Ayurveda not as a fixed inheritance from the past, but as a living and changing field shaped by print culture, markets, practitioners, bottles, pocket watches, stethoscopes and other small technologies.

The episode also looks at Projit’s idea of “braided sciences”: a way of understanding medical knowledge as something made through the creative weaving together of different strands, rather than through the meeting of two separate and unchanging systems. From Ayurvedic pulse-taking to medicated hair oil bottles travelling from Calcutta to Philadelphia, the conversation asks how objects can transform the ways bodies, medicines and healers are understood.

In the second half of the episode, the discussion turns to race science, nationalism, genetics and the politics of remembering and forgetting. Projit reflects on his book Brown Skins, White Coats, the afterlives of colonial categories, and the ways scientific knowledge can become entangled with national identity, exclusion and claims about who belongs.

At the heart of the episode is a question that runs throughout the series: how can the history of medicine help us think more carefully about knowledge, power, healing and the many ways human beings have understood the body?

Subscribe to Medicine and the Healing Arts wherever you get your podcasts for thoughtful conversations with scholars and practitioners on Asian medicine, religion, history, healing and the questions they raise for health today.

Links and resources:

Prof. Projit Mukharji:
https://hss.sas.upenn.edu/people/projit-bihari-mukharji

Prof. Projit Mukharji’s blog:
https://web.sas.upenn.edu/mukharji/

Projit Mukharji, Brown Skins, White Coats: Race Science in India, 1920–66:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo183632345.html

Projit Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences:
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo23996931.html

Projit Mukharji, Nationalizing the Body: The Medical Market, Print and Daktari Medicine:
https://anthempress.com/books/nationalizing-the-body-hb

Actor-Network Theory:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%e2%80%93network_theory

Subaltern:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subaltern_(postcolonialism)

Prof. David Arnold:
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/people/staff_index/d_arnold/

David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India:
https://www.ucpress.edu/books/colonizing-the-body/paper

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks :
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/313127/black-skin-white-masks-by-fanon-frantz/9780241396667

Saidiya Hartman - critical fabulation:
https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/298/4088

India’s Ministry of AYUSH:
https://ayush.gov.in/

Prof. Judith Farquhar:
https://anthropology.uchicago.edu/directory/Judith-B-Farquhar

The summit brought together practitioners, scholars, policy makers, ministers of health, healers and delegates from around the world to consider the place of traditional medicine in contemporary health systems. For Michael and Ronit, it was an opportunity to see many of the questions at the heart of this podcast playing out on a global stage: can mainstream biomedicine and traditional medical systems work together? What happens when different ways of knowing and treating the body meet? And can history help us think more clearly about the future of medicine?

Together, they discuss the atmosphere of the summit, the diversity of people and practices represented there, and the challenge of thinking across different medical traditions without reducing them to a single model of evidence or efficacy. They reflect on examples from India, China, Iraq, Brazil, Canada, Mongolia and beyond, asking what it might mean to become not only medically bilingual, but medically polyglot.

The conversation also explores the role of history in understanding medicine today. Michael and Ronit consider how the movement of medical knowledge across regions, traditions and time periods can help us rethink the relationship between traditional medicine, biomedicine, policy, intellectual property, data, and lived experience.

At the heart of the episode is a question that runs throughout the series: how can different cultures, histories and knowledge systems help us imagine more open, ethical and plural ways of thinking about health, healing and human flourishing?

Subscribe to Medicine and the Healing Arts wherever you get your podcasts for thoughtful conversations with scholars and practitioners on Asian medicine, religion, history, healing and the questions they raise for health today.

Links and resources:

Second WHO Global Summit on Traditional Medicine - full summit recordings:
https://tm-summit.org/2025/

WHO Traditional Medicine Global Library - a global resource including multimedia documentation, peer-reviewed articles, policy papers and more: https://tmgl.org

First WHO Global Summit on Traditional Medicine: https://tm-summit.org/2023/

WHO Global Traditional Medicine Centre, Gujarat: https://www.who.int/teams/who-global-traditional-medicine-centre/overview

International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine(IASTAM): https://iastam.org/

WHO Traditional Medicine Strategy 2025–2034: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240113176

Medicine and the Healing Arts pillar, MIT Comparative Global Humanities: https://comparativeglobalhumanities.mit.edu/pillars/healing-arts-and-human-well-being/

MIT Comparative Global Humanities: https://comparativeglobalhumanities.mit.edu/

Dr. Fietje is based at the Behavioural and Cultural Insights unit at the WHO Regional Office for Europe. With a background in English literature and the cultural history of medicine, he now works at the intersection of culture, public health and policy, asking how cultural contexts affect the ways people understand illness, care, pain, treatment and well-being.

Together, Michael, Ronit and Nils explore how someone with a PhD in English literature came to work at the WHO; what culture has to do with public health; and why the humanities matter for medicine today. They discuss the growing field of arts and health, including the evidence that artistic and cultural participation can support mental health, social connection and physical well-being.

The conversation also looks at social prescribing, the idea that a GP might one day prescribe a museum visit, a choir, a nature walk or another form of cultural engagement alongside more conventional forms of care. More broadly, the episode asks how culture can help us rethink what counts as evidence, what kinds of knowledge matter in medicine, and how health systems might better respond to the complexity of human experience.

Subscribe to Medicine and the Healing Arts wherever you get your podcasts for thoughtful conversations with scholars and practitioners on Asian medicine, religion, history, healing and the questions they raise for health today.

Links and resources:

Dr. Nils Fietje profile from the Culture for Health project:
https://www.cultureforhealth.eu/inspiration/how-the-arts-entered-the-who/

The evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being — scoping review:
https://bci-hub.org/documents/what-evidence-role-arts-improving-health-and-well-being-scoping-review

The Lancet article on arts, health and well-being:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(15)60226-4/fulltext

The BCI Hub, an online resource centre and knowledge repository for emerging research on behavioural and cultural factors that affect health behaviour, in collaboration with the WHO Collaborating Centre at the University of Exeter:
https://bci-hub.org/

NHS Social prescribing (England):
https://www.england.nhs.uk/personalisedcare/social-prescribing/

UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport 2024 report on culture, health and wellbeing:
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/culture-and-heritage-capital-research-and-outputs

Daniel Moerman, Meaning, Medicine and the ‘Placebo Effect’:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/meaning-medicine-and-the-placebo-effect/C189929ABE972E5D4C7FE32008EE8838

Subscribe to be notified when future episodes are released:
https://www.asianmedicinezone.com/s/medicine-and-the-healing-arts

In this opening episode, hosts Profs. Michael Stanley-Baker and Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim introduce the podcast and reflect on the paths that brought them to the history of medicine and the healing arts. They share how their thinking and scholarly practice have developed over time, the questions that continue to animate their work, and some of the encounters, insights and formative moments that have shaped the way they understand medicine, healing, history and care.

Across the series, Michael and Ronit will be joined by scholars, practitioners and thinkers to explore historically rooted medical knowledge as a resource for rethinking health, illness, care and well-being in the present. Together, they consider how different cultures and traditions have understood the body, healing, suffering, environment and the meaning of health.

This first episode sets out the central questions of the podcast: what can ancient Asian medicine, global healing traditions and the long history of medical knowledge teach us about the challenges facing medicine today?

Subscribe to Medicine and the Healing Arts wherever you get your podcasts for thoughtful conversations with scholars and practitioners on Asian medicine, religion, history, healing and the questions they raise for health today.

Subscribe now

Links and resources:

• MIT Global Humanities Initiative- Medicine and the Healing Arts pillar: https://comparativeglobalhumanities.mit.edu/pillars/healing-arts-and-human-well-being/

• Life of Breath project: https://lifeofbreath.webspace.durham.ac.uk/

• Asian Medicine and COVID 19 Special Issue: https://brill.com/view/journals/asme/16/1/asme.16.issue-1.xml

• IASTAM: https://iastam.org/

• IASTAM COVID webinars: https://iastam.org/category/webinars/

• NTU and Max-Planck Center for Bio-Cultural Worlding: https://ntu.ccasingapore.org/researchs/max-planck-ntu-singapore-centre-for-biocultural-worlding/