This volume contains five chapters written by American, European and Central Asian scholars, who examine a range of issues critical to our understanding of health and healing in contemporary Central Asia. Grounded in the review of medical literature in Arabic, Persian and Chaghatay Turkic, extensive field work in the Central Asian republics, and the examination of state and Communist Party archival records, this book offers a range of insights and new perspectives on this area.

The chapters of this edited volume survey largely unstudied medical texts produced and circulated in Central Asia from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, provide a detailed account of the administrative regulation of addiction and Stalinist repression of opium users in Soviet Badakhshan, explore the complex relationships between biomedicine and indigenous healing practices and discourses, and discuss the politics and epidemiology of HIV/AIDS in Central Asia.

This book was published as a special issue of Central Asian Survey.