A Survey of Images from the Chinese Medical Classics (original) (raw)
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Asian Medicine, 2005
This article is a preliminary survey of representations of the body produced in China from the Song to the Qjng period in the context of medicine, forensic medicine and Daoism. Despite much common theoretical background, bodily representation in each of these fields differs in function and intent. Each field came to be associated with a particular aspect of the body. For medicine, this was the description of the viscera and the channels and tracts through which qi and humours flowed; for forensic medicine, it was the description of the skeleton; for Daoism, it was the symbolic description of the body as the spatio-temporal locus of a system of mutations and correspondences with the outside world and the spirit world.These representations fall into three categories, reflecting three different approaches to the body: images of the whole body approached from without, including gymnastic postures, locations on the body, somatic measurements, channels and tracts; images of the inside of ...
Medical History, 2007
Hiding in Plain Sight‐ancient Chinese anatomy
The Anatomical Record, 2020
For thousands of years, scientists have studied human anatomy by dissecting bodies. Our knowledge of their findings is limited, however, both by the subsequent loss of many of the oldest texts, and by a tendency toward a Eurocentric perspective in medicine. As a discipline, anatomy tends to be much more familiar with ancient Greek texts than with those from India, China, or Persia. Here, we show that the Mawangdui medical texts, entombed in the Mawangdui burial site in Changsha, China 168 BCE, are the oldest surviving anatomical atlas in the world. These medical texts both predate and inform the later acupuncture texts which have been the foundation for acupuncture practice in the subsequent two millennia. The skills necessary to interpret them are diverse, requiring the researcher firstly to read the original Chinese, and secondly to perform the anatomical investigations that allow a reviewing of the structures that the texts refer to. Acupuncture meridians are considered to be esoteric in nature, but these texts are clearly descriptions of the physical body. As such, they represent a previously hidden chapter in the history of anatomy, and a new perspective on acupuncture.
Seeing the body: The divergence of ancient Chinese and Western medical illustration
J Biocommun, 2006
A medical illustration is the culmination of centuries of medical philosophy, science, and spirituality. Despite similar beginnings, different circumstances surrounding the development of Chinese and Western medical thought eventually led to their divergence. Through an historical comparison, I will attempt to demonstrate how the East and the West came to have such different views, and thus illustrations, of the human body.
Monumenta Serica, 2018
In 1759, Zhao Xuemin 趙學敏, a scholar and physician from Qiantang County (present-day Hangzhou), compiled his Chuanya 串雅. Based on certain editions of this work, modern scholars have assumed that this text is composed of recipes collected from itinerant healers, and that it was its author’s intention to transmit folk healing practices through the printed word. The original manuscript that Zhao Xuemin compiled probably never reached print, however, whereas the extant editions of this text found numerous new editions and re-printings. Focusing on several manuscripts and printed editions of the Chuanya which emerged between the late Qing and Republican period, this article traces the processes through which various different agents created and recreated the Chuanya. In contrast to past studies where the connection between the Chuanya and popular healing is taken for granted, I argue that any conclusion should primarily take into account the various editions of this work. By the case study of this text, I hope to clarify a broader dimension around the authorship of printed medical books in late imperial China and challenge the assumption that we can understand them outside the context of their edition and publication.
Festschrift issue in honor of Nathan Sivin, Asia Major series 3, 21.1 (2008): 325-57. Acupuncture channels and bodily viscera, wrist pulse sites and point locations along tracts, abnormal eyes and discolored tongues – these are just some of the ways Chinese medical texts depict the human body. Sometimes these images depict the whole body, other times the inside, and in special contexts as something best described as a symbolic body. Of all types of illustrations of the human body found in Chinese medical texts, some of the most unique, multivalent, and as yet unexamined images are those of hands. Chinese medical texts portray the hand as a microcosm of China's geography, as a diagnostic tool for determining the illnesses of infants, a site for therapeutic, a calculator, and as a mnemonic tool for aiding memory.
In the course of more than half a millennia of interaction between Chinese medicine 中醫 and biomedicine 西醫, the map and icon of the body as machine has resulted in the hegemonic translation of the TCM body. Looking at the excellent illustrations of 'body parts' which form the first pages of a Chinese translation of Doctor Benjamin Hobson's book Treatise on Midwifery and Diseases of Children 婦嬰新說, published in l840's, and comparing them with the simple stylised line drawings of the 16th century 'body' parts from Chinese classical medical books, one can see the disparity in structural details and inscription techniques. In Donna Haraway's words, it was an 'unequal structuring' of two bodily inscriptions. Like Yee Quock Ping's map and icon a century ago, the TCM body underwent a thorough unilateral translation. The Ming dynasty internal organ body charts gave way to modern books on acupuncture, both Chinese and Western, which 'generally show the chart system of the acu-tracts superimposed upon modern anatomical diagrams. This encapsulates what happened when the premodern Chinese medicine body chart encountered the modern Western biomedical body chart. In this presentation, I will narrate how this came about; present the state of play and the continuing interaction between the two sets of visual representations of the human body.
THE WUWEI MEDICAL MANUSCRIPTS: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION AND TRANSLATION
Discovered by farmers from an unmarked tomb in 1972 in Gansu, the Wuwei strips and tablets set forth a wealth of information about ancient Chinese drug formulary and acupuncture. The present article supplies the first English-language translation of its contents along with a brief introduction.