The Healer's Body as a Form of Technology in Traditional Chinese Medicine

FAIN: FEL-257723-18

Marta E. Hanson
Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD 21218-2608)

Reasearch and writing leading to publication of a book on technologies of diagnosis and healing in traditional Chinese medicine.

For my NEH funded project, I plan to complete a book on the healer’s body in Chinese medicine from antiquity to the end of the mid eighteenth century. By shifting focus from the patient’s to the healer’s body, I demonstrate how Chinese physicians instrumentalized their bodies as medical instruments, calculating devices, and mnemonic aids in their pre-modern world before medical instruments became external to the healer’s body, calculators took over higher-order math once done with our brains, and computers became repositories for the memory we once held in our minds. They also used their body-as-technology through time-keeping breathing techniques, purification rituals, and personal comportment to be more therapeutically effective and make themselves more trustworthy, morally upright, and socially acceptable vis-à-vis their competitors for their patients. This study contributes to the history of the body and bodily arts of memory, prognostication, and being in Chinese medicine.

Associated Products

“From Under the Elbow to Pointing to the Palm: Chinese Metaphors for Learning Medicine by the Book (4th-14th Centuries),” (Article)
Title: “From Under the Elbow to Pointing to the Palm: Chinese Metaphors for Learning Medicine by the Book (4th-14th Centuries),”
Author: Marta Hanson
Abstract: This article focuses on transformations in the main metaphors in ancient to late medieval titles of Chinese medical books used to convey to potential readers their ‘learning-by-the-book’ contents. It finds that in contrast to the European preference for hand metaphors in the genre terms – enchiridions, manuals, and handbooks – the Chinese medical archive preserves bodily metaphors within which the hand metaphor appears only rarely in the early medieval period and is then superseded by metaphors that rely on the fingers and palms more than the hands per se. This long-durée survey from roughly the fourth to fourteenth centuries of the wide-ranging metaphors for ‘handy medical books’ places their historical emergence and transformation within the history of Chinese medical manuscripts and printed texts. Metaphors in medical titles conveyed to potential readers at the time significant textual innovations in how medical knowledge would be presented to them. For later historians, they provide evidence of profound changes in managing an increasingly complex and expanding archive of Chinese medical manuscripts and printed texts. Innovations in textual reorganization intended to facilitate ‘learning by the book’ were often creatively captured in an illuminating range of genre distinctions, descriptors, and metaphors.
Year: 2020
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.1017/bjt.2020.6
Primary URL Description: This is the doi # for the specific article.
Secondary URL: https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/feature-story/learning-book-manuals-and-handbooks-history-science
Secondary URL Description: This is a feature story about the publication on the website of the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: British Journal for the History of Science: Themes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

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