All human societies across the some 300,000 years of Homo sapiens existence have needed healers – from hunter-gatherer tribes to the first agricultural societies to our modern world today.

The medicine men of ancient Egypt gave way to Indian Ayurveda and the Chinese sinseh; Hippocrates and the Greeks; Ibn Sina in the Islamic Golden Age; the shamans, witch doctors and medicine men of various indigenous tribes worldwide; and the Malay archipelago’s bomoh, pawang and dukun.