| FA-52204-06 | Research Programs: Fellowships for University Teachers | Miranda Dympna Brown | Chinese Medical Epistemology in Transition, ca. 350 BCE-220 CE | 9/1/2006 - 5/31/2007 | $40,000.00 | Miranda | Dympna | Brown | | | | Regents of the University of Michigan | Ann Arbor | MI | 48109-1382 | USA | 2005 | History, General | Fellowships for University Teachers | Research Programs | 40000 | 0 | 40000 | 0 |
This study explains the origins of acupuncture during the Western Han period (206 BCE-25 CE) in terms of a shift in medical epistemology around the first century BCE. Whereas earlier medical theorists stressed knowledge about the body grounded in experience, those living after the first century BCE de-emphasized the experience of ordinary men in favor of revealed wisdom attributed to sages. This shift was related to the rise of a new, political notion of sagehood in the Qin court, which held that sages were not morally perfected men, but beings with extraordinary faculties of perception. |