Volker Scheid is Visiting Professor at the University of Westminster, London, where he was previously Professor of East Asian Medicines and Director of EASTmedicine (East Asian Sciences and Traditions in Medicine), an interdisciplinary research group that explored the historical development of East Asian medicines and their translation into modern use contexts. Prof. Scheid’s work at the MPIWG continues to pursue a central ambition of his work at EASTmedicine; namely, to find ways of thinking historically about East Asian medicines without relying on existing meta-narratives, periodization, analytical categories and similar historiographic tools that may be ill-fitted to understand East Asian medicines?
Prof. Scheid has published widely on the history of Chinese medicine in the late imperial and modern eras, including Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis (Duke UP, 2002), Currents of Tradition, 1526-2006 (Eastland Press, 2007), Chinese Herbal Medicine: Formulas and Strategies 2nd ed. (with Dan Bensky et al, Eastland Press 2009), and Integrating East Asian Medicines into Contemporary Healthcare (with Hugh MacPherson, Elsevier, 2011), as well as numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals. The interdisciplinary character of his research is perhaps best reflected in a study on the Chinese medicine treatment of menopausal syndrome funded by NHS England that combined ethnographic, historical and clinical research Prof. Scheid was President of the International Association for the Study of Asian Medicines (IASTAM) from 2005 to 2013. He is a Fellow of the Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine and the British Acupuncture Association.
