Eastern medicines are becoming more popular in the west, but few people realize how long the two cultures have exchanged ideas.

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问题     Eastern medicines are becoming more popular in the west, but few people realize how long the two cultures have exchanged ideas. Now an exhibition at the Science Museum in London explores how the two have interacted on medicine through the centuries.
    Called East Meets West: Medical Ideas on the Move. It looks at examples of how ideas and technologies have moved from one side of the world to another. It opens on Thursday and is based on an exhibition presented by the Welcome Trust; Neil Fazakerley is curator of the exhibition. He said: "It’s attractive because it’s taking a medical history story but from a slightly different angle, showing how the different cultures have interacted."
    "It’s obvious that eastern medical practices are becoming more popular in the west but maybe people don’t know that ideas have been exchanged for thousands of years and medicine is not a static thing." The exhibition details four main areas: Ancient Greek and Islamic medical ideas, and how they were reborn into western culture. The exhibition starts in the ninth and tenth centuries when Baghdad was the centre of Islamic science and its highly sophisticated medical system. Through the translation work of Persian scholars, ancient Greek medical thought was brought into the Islamic medical system. It was when westerners started charging into the east on crusades during the twelfth century that European scholars became increasingly interested in Islamic medicine.
    Arabic material was translated into Latin, the European scholars’ language of the time, thus preserving the Greek tradition that may otherwise have been lost. Coexistence of Islamic and Indian traditions and the development of western medicine in colonial India—the traditional Indian medical system, known as ayurveda or "the knowledge of life"—has existed in some form for more than 2,000 years. During foreign invasions from the eleventh century onwards the Islamic unani system of medicine was brought to India.
    The Indian name for Islamic medicine "unani" refers originally to the Greeks. The two systems complemented each other well and both ayurveda and unani flourish today in India. European colonists from the sixteenth century onwards, gained knowledge of plants, diseases and surgical techniques that were unknown in the West. One such example is rauwolfia (萝芙木) serpentia (美蛇根), a plant used in traditional Indian medicine. The active ingredient is today used to treat hypertension and anxiety in the west. The flow of ideas turned with the growth of the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as many Western-style hospitals and medical colleges were established in India.
    Inoculation—a true example of collaborative medicine.
    "A good example of the exchange of medical ideas between east and west is that of immunization," the exhibition says. Smallpox inoculation has long been used by physicians in Asia and Africa by deliberately attempting to give people a mild smallpox infection. The technique became known in Europe in the eighteenth century and this technique was practiced for a while on the British aristocracy.  
The earliest Eastern medical thought brought to European was from

选项 A、ancient Greek medicine.
B、ancient Indian medicine.
C、Persian medicine.
D、Islamic medicine.

答案D

解析 主旨题。原文开头和结尾几次提到exchange,interact等词,首段末句总结了展览的主题是揭示东西方医药文化的相互作用,且接下来的几段都是围绕着展览的主题展开的,由此可知,本文主要介绍几世纪以来中西方在医学方面的相互作用,选项C概括最完整。
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