Ivette M. Vargas-O’Bryan is Chair and Associate professor of Religion in the Department of Religious Studies at Austin College, USA. She has been a recipient of several prestigious awards and grants and is known for her recent work on demons and illness and Buddhist nuns in Tibetan religious and medical traditions. Ivette has also authored publications on Asian monastic traditions, religion and healing, animals in religion, and religion and the environment. ZHOU Xun is lecturer of Modern History at the University of Essex, UK. She has authored and edited several books, including Narcotic Culture: A History of Drug Consumption in China (2004), Smoke: A Global History of Smoking (2004), and The Great Famine in China, 1957-1962: A Documentary History (2012). Her most recent book Forgotten Voices of Mao’s Great Famine, 1958-1962: an Oral History (2013) is a remarkable oral history of modern China’s greatest tragedy.

• Introduction Part I: Disease Management in Medical and Ritual Contexts 1. The management of sickness in an Indian medical vernacular 2.Like an Indian god: Saint Anthony of Padua in Tamil Nadu as a healer and exorcist 3.Devotion and affliction in the time of cholera: ritual healing, identity and resistance among Bengali Muslims 4. Wong Tai Sin: The divine and healing in Hong Kong Part II: Religious and Medical Explanatory Models 5. Ghost exorcism, memory, and healing in Hinduism 6. Storytelling and accountability for illness in Sanskrit medical literature Part III: Cultural Interfaces and Collisions 7. The Method-and-Wisdom model in the theoretical syncretism of traditional Mongolian medicine 8. Balancing Tradition Alongside a Progressively Scientific Tibetan Medical System 9. Diagnostic techniques of Chinese Traditional Medicine and their interface with the globalisation of medical practice 10. Healing Zen: Exploring the brain on bowing