BOOK REVIEW Audrey Prost: Precious Pills: Medicine and Social Change among Tibetan Refugees in India Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, Epistemologies of Healing Series, Vol. 2, 2008, 156 pp, $29.95, ISBN 978 1 84545 457 9 Sienna R. Craig Published online: 2 September 2009 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009 How does a prolonged experience of displacement affect individual and commu- nity-based understandings of health and illness? How do the realities of diaspora– understood, in part, as a removal from one’s social ecology and physical environment–transform practices of traditional medicine? Audrey Prost structures Precious Pills: Medicine and Social Change among Tibetan Refugees in India around these two distinct yet interconnected questions. On balance, the first question is both more compellingly addressed and more prominent in the structure of the book, but both are taken up with care and nuance. This study of medicine and social change is the first sustained monograph to address the phenomenon of Tibetan exile with attention to larger anthropological literatures on displacement, social suffering and the modernization and globalization of ‘‘traditional’’ medicines. It also provides a useful corrective to studies of displacement that focus more on the biophysical indicators of public health and pathology than on the social realities in which exiled communities live. Scholarship on medicine, health and illness in Tibetan and Himalayan societies has increased significantly over the past decade. This has been evidenced not only by the growing number of indigenous and foreign scholars presenting their work at venues such as the Xth and XIth seminars of the International Association of Tibetan Studies, in Oxford (2003) and Ko ¨nigswinter, Germany (2006), respectively, but also by the publication of several new monographs (Garrett 2008; Pietkiewicz 2008) and edited volumes (Schrempf 2007; Pordie ´ 2008, 2009; Adams et al. Forthcoming; Craig et al. 2009), as well as a growing collection of individual book chapters and journal articles. Prost’s slim yet thoughtful book finds its place alongside these new academic offerings. Furthermore, while several other articles and book chapters (Adams 1998; Janes 1999; Samuel 1999) have addressed what we might call Tibetan idioms of distress and cultural contextualizations of social S. R. Craig (&) Department of Anthropology, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA e-mail: sienna.craig@dartmouth.edu 123 Cult Med Psychiatry (2009) 33:643–647 DOI 10.1007/s11013-009-9152-4