Annotated Bibliography of Tibetan Medicine – Jurgen C. Aschoff

Jürgen C. Aschoff, born in 1938, has been a frequent traveller in Northern India, Ladakh, Zanskar, Nepal and Tibet over the past 25 years. By profession a neurologist at the Uni- versity of Ulm, he has published several books covering these regions, including ‘Tsaparang’ (MC Verlag 1989) on the history and present state of Tsaparang, an old mo- nastery in Western Tibet, and his important and valuable ‘Kommentierte Bibliogra- phie deutschsprachiger Bücher und Aufsätze’ covering Tibet, Nepal and the cultural region of the Himalayas (Garuda Verlag 1992). For some time he has coope- rated with Tibetan traditional doctors and treated some of his patients with Tibetan medicines.
“Westerners are fascinated by the traditional medicines of Tibet, India and China, although we know much more about the Ayur- vedic medicine of India and the traditional medicine of China than about Tibetan medicine. But Tibetan medicine has such a rich inheritance and value that it seems important not only to enrich our knowledge, but also to preserve all the information gathered throughout the past centuries. This I have done, and I like to introduce the reader to this work, in which I have col- lected over several years more than 1700 written sources on Ti- betan medicine from all over the world.
The reader of my ‘Annotated Bibliography on Tibetan Medicine’ may not only enlarge his/her knowledge on Tibetan medicine, but may also discover new interests; an understanding of Tibetan medicine may even help ease some suffering in patients. It is not an easy task to define Tibetan medicine, especially to distinguish it from ‘Healing’ within the context of Tibetan religion, philoso- phy, meditation and Shamanism. It is equally problematic to separate Tibet geographically from Nepal. I have tried to avoid too narrow a definition of Tibetan medicine and have included – apart from the Tibetan classic medicine – the shamanistic as well as religious and philosophically-based ‘healing rituals’.”

Annotated Bibliography of Tibetan Medicine – Jurgen C. Aschoff