Unani Medicine in the Making by Kira Schmidt-Stiedenroth offers a nuanced account of the practitioners and practices of Unani medicine, a South Asian medicine often associated with Muslim communities, in contemporary India. Her book makes an important contribution to the interdisciplinary body of scholarship on Unani medicine and to vibrant scholarly discussions about the modernities of South Asian traditional medicines. Building on rich ethnographic fieldwork in Hyderabad and Mumbai and extensive interactions with Unani professionals, practitioners, and students, Schmidt-Stiedenroth shifts the scholarly conversation in exciting new directions by exploring “Unani's inherent multiplicity” (p. 253) and the many enactments of Unani medicine. Unani Medicine in the Making also follows the links between Unani's performative enactments and therapeutic shifts. Throughout the book, Schmidt-Stiedenroth builds a compelling case that the modernization of traditional medicines does not lead to inevitable biomedicalization and standardization.

The six chapters of Unani Medicine in the Making address Unani's enactments, including as secular Indian medicine, humoral medicine, and Islamic medicine, as well as the performative role of many Unani practices, such as pulse readings. In the first two chapters, Schmidt-Stiedenroth makes a convincing case that instead of Unani's multiplicity enduring despite state regulatory regimes, “the multiplicity of its being” is understood by practitioners as integral to Unani (p. 12). For example, chapter 1 explores how Unani's enactment as a coherent system of medicine—in response to the postcolonial Indian state—paradoxically provides shelter to Unani's multiplicity and “allows it to vary in practice” (p. 78). Chapter 2 then investigates how multiplicity is a useful lens for understanding Unani on the ground. In Schmidt-Stiedenroth's account, state regulations, educational institutionalization, and professional recognition reinforce rather than eliminate Unani's multiplicity. More broadly, she moves beyond established debates over incommensurability and epistemological conflict through this focus on multiple enactments.

Chapter 3 makes a valuable contribution to historical scholarship on Unani. Schmidt-Stiedenroth interrogates the dominance of the concept of the humors in scholarly and popular understandings of Unani through a “looping effect” in which institutional and competitive pressures to define Unani's unique attributes shape its enactments and often limit its study (p. 156). In destabilizing the humors as a defining feature of modern Unani, Schmidt-Stiedenroth productively encourages readers to move beyond unified definitions of Unani. This chapter demonstrates that for many practitioners, rather than the humors or specific diagnostic tools, it is the underlying intellectual approach—centered on “root causes” (p. 163) and “reasoning” (p. 191)—that distinguishes Unani from biomedicine.

The next three chapters attend to Unani's complex relationship to biomedical technologies and “modern scientific” institutions. Schmidt-Stiedenroth eloquently discusses the initial friction between the existing literature and her own ethnographic experiences. Chapter 4 examines how new medical technologies are incorporated into Unani practice through an emphasis on the practitioner's intellectual approach to disease causation and root causes as the distinctive Unani element of treatment. Chapter 5 tracks how many Unani professionals approach scientific institutions as a crucial means for garnering recognition rather than either “an epistemological trap” (p. 25) or “capitulation” (p. 201). Finally, the sixth chapter turns to the plural enactments of Unani as Islamic medicine in contemporary India.

A crucial theme in these final chapters is how discourses of universal science and scientific neutrality are appropriated and deployed by “traditional” medical practitioners in aid of Unani's multiplicity. Specifically, Schmidt-Stiedenroth follows how many hakims conceptualize Unani medicine as ‘ilm or “knowledge itself” that can seamlessly appropriate “modern science as methodology” (p. 219). While carefully attending to the asymmetries involved, she elucidates how Unani professionals conceptualize modern medical technologies, which might initially appear to be outside the ambit of Unani, as a neutral methodological toolkit to enhance their Unani practices. Here Schmidt-Stiedenroth makes a valuable contribution to the histories of science in modern Muslim societies and to studies of modern South Asian medicines, especially alongside the work of Guy Attewell and Projit Mukharji.

This excellent book opens many new avenues of research. One intriguing area for future research is the conceptual work that translation performs for Unani professionals. Unani Medicine in the Making reveals that many hakims understand the pursuit of scientific recognition as “a process of translation into the language of modern science” (p. 194). For example, Schmidt-Stiedenroth discusses how the use of what might be seen as biomedical drugs involves “translating existing Unani knowledge into the globally accepted language of modern science” (pp. 222–23). The potent role of translation (and language) in the enactments of Unani opens exciting new possibilities for scholarship. Likewise, Schmidt-Stiedenroth's analysis of the agency that Unani professionals found through the appropriation of discourses of universal science suggests the importance of better understanding Unani's place among competing scientific universalisms in postcolonial India.

Unani Medicine in the Making is a brilliant, lucidly written, and eloquently argued book that will be helpful for historians, anthropologists, and scholars of religion and medicine in South Asia. Moreover, this book will be widely used in the classroom both for South Asia–specific courses and for thematic offerings on the histories of medicine and science, which is a significant accomplishment.