This dissertation explores how body maps served as a site for theoretical, experimental, and cultural entanglements between "Chinese medicine" and "biomedicine." It explores how body atlases produced under varying social and cultural conditions involved similar ontological questions with diverging social and cultural implications. These ontological questions set into motion disparate theories about the body that continue to destabilize contemporary medical practice. I explore the fate of maps that medical practitioners in China and Britain traced on paper and on people. Rather than representing what could be directly observed, these maps made visible what could be felt. Body maps offer a unique approach to transnational histories of science and medicine because they existed as meticulously crafted artifacts of visual perception and material evidence that carried social and political currency. In particular, I follow how Chinese physiologists re-presented meridian paths for acupuncture moxibustion practice and the conceptual friction that these maps introduced once they were compared with sensation maps that British neurologists produced to identify peripheral nerve clusters and distinct areas of pain. Amidst state-building efforts in the early twentieth century, medical practitioners in China reproduced meridian maps to emphasize the technical and systematic virtues of acupuncture moxibustion. Yet, meridian maps presented an ontological problem, as standardizing its paths required fixing locations along courses that shifted in living bodies. This dissertation picks up where political historians leave off, examining transformations in medical theory and tracking how individuals concerned with constructing the legacy of medicine in China eventually came to resurrect abandoned neurophysiological maps produced in late nineteenth century Britain. Through a careful excavation of image and text, I demonstrate how efforts to locate shifting areas on the surface of the body conflicted and cohered with discourses of science. I argue that "intimate cartographies," or maps based on individual encounters of the body, challenged standards of visualizing and describing unseen physiological systems. These maps sat at the intersection of epistemic practices, where the circulation of images, ideas, and individuals contributed to the complex convergence of body maps across regimes of knowledge. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, libraries.mit.edu/docs - docs@mit.edu)
...More
Article
Chang, Rhonda;
(2014)
Making Theoretical Principles for New Chinese Medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB001421869/)
Article
Jo, J.;
(2015)
A Study on the Awareness of Chinese Medicine by Medical Missionaries: Focused on The China Medical Missionary Journal (1887--1932)
(/isis/citation/CBB001422436/)
Book
Jütte, Robert;
Eklöf, Motzi;
Nelson, Marie C.;
(2001)
Historical Concepts of Unconventional Medicine: Approaches, Concepts, Case Studies
(/isis/citation/CBB000101239/)
Article
Bivins, Roberta;
(1999)
Expectations and expertise: Early British responses to Chinese medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB000111770/)
Book
Brown, Miranda;
(2015)
The Art of Medicine in Early China: The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive
(/isis/citation/CBB001422618/)
Article
Peng, Mu;
(2006)
The Doctor's Body: Embodiment and Multiplicity of Chinese Medical Knowledge
(/isis/citation/CBB001021326/)
Article
Goldschmidt, Asaf;
(2001)
Changing Standards: Tracing Changes in Acu-moxa Therapy during the Transition from the Tang to the Song Dynasties
(/isis/citation/CBB000330649/)
Article
Mathias Vigouroux;
(2017)
The surgeon’s acupuncturist : Philipp Franz von Siebold’s encounter with Ishizaka Sōtetsu and nineteenth century Japanese acupuncture
(/isis/citation/CBB423518156/)
Article
Harrison, Henrietta;
(2012)
Rethinking Missionaries and Medicine in China: The Miracles of Assunta Pallotta, 1905--2005
(/isis/citation/CBB001202139/)
Article
Furth, Charlotte;
(2011)
The Ams/Paterson Lecture: Becoming Alternative? Modern Transformations of Chinese Medicine in China and in the United States
(/isis/citation/CBB001250780/)
Thesis
Shing-ting Lin;
(2015)
The Female Hand: The Making of Western Medicine for Women in China, 1880s–1920s
(/isis/citation/CBB532007965/)
Article
Burns, William R.;
(2008)
East Meets West: How China almost Cured Malaria
(/isis/citation/CBB000932162/)
Book
Bridie Andrews;
(2014)
The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850-1960
(/isis/citation/CBB980033671/)
Essay Review
Howard Chiang;
(2016)
Review of Bridie Andrews, The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 and Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China's Modernity
(/isis/citation/CBB111859658/)
Book
C. Michele Thompson;
(2015)
Vietnamese Traditional Medicine: A Social History
(/isis/citation/CBB013500686/)
Article
Wu, Yi-Li;
(2009)
The Gendered Medical Iconography of the Golden Mirror (Yuzuan yizong jinjian, 1742)
(/isis/citation/CBB001020984/)
Chapter
Mathias Vigouroux;
(2013)
Commerce des livres et diplomatie : la transmission de Chine et de Corée vers le Japon des savoirs médicaux liés à la pratique de l’acuponcture et de la moxibustion (1603-1868)
(/isis/citation/CBB974717424/)
Article
Liang, Rong;
(2003)
An Exploration on the Feature of Tongue Picture and Medical Standpoint in the Traditional Medicine of China and Japan
(/isis/citation/CBB000500422/)
Article
Wen-Hua Kuo;
(2019)
An Ecumenical Medicine Yet To Come: Reflections on Needham on Medicine
(/isis/citation/CBB717156554/)
Book
Serlin, David;
(2010)
Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture
(/isis/citation/CBB001023113/)
Be the first to comment!