Article ID: CBB545376910

Promoting Free Flow in the Networks: Re-imagining the Body in Early Modern Suzhou (2018)

unapi

The history of Chinese medicine is still widely imagined in terms dictated by the discourse of modernity, that is as ‘traditional’ and ‘Chinese.’ And yet, so as to be intelligible to us moderns, it must simultaneously be framed through categories that make it comparable somehow to the ‘West’ and the ‘modern’ from which it is said to be essentially different. This is accomplished, for instance, by viewing Chinese medicine as fundamentally shaped by cosmological thinking, as focusing on process rather than matter, and as forever hampered by attachments to the past even when it tries to innovate. At the same time, it is described as pursuing its objectives in ways that make sense in ‘our’ terms, too, such as the goal of creating physiological homeostasis through methods of supplementation and drainage. In this paper, I seek to move beyond this kind of analysis through a two-pronged approach. First, by focusing on the concept of tong 通 - a character that calls forth images of free flow, connectivity, relatedness and understanding - I foreground an important aspect of Chinese medical thinking and practice that has virtually been ignored by Western historians of medicine and science. Second, by exploring how the influential physician Ye Tianshi 葉天士 (1664–1746) employed tong to advance medical thinking and practice at a crucial moment of change in the history of Chinese medicine, I demonstrate that physicians in early modern China moved towards new understandings of the body readily intelligible by modern biomedical anatomy. I argue that this mode of analysis allows us to transcend the limitations inherent in the current historiography of Chinese medicine: because it allows for comparison to emerge from our subject matter rather than imposing our imaginaries onto it in advance.

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Article Volker Scheid; Curie Virág (2018) Introduction to History of Science Special Section on Tong 通. History of Science (pp. 123-130). unapi

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https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB545376910/

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Authors & Contributors
Cohen, H. Floris
Sabino Illecito
Giuseppe Papagno
Dib, Antoine
Bramao-Ramos, Sarah
Suzanne Z. Gottschang
Concepts
Cross-cultural comparison
Medicine
Medicine and culture
Historiography
Medicine, Chinese traditional
Cross-cultural interaction; cultural influence
Time Periods
Early modern
Medieval
Ancient
Modern
Renaissance
19th century
Places
China
Europe
Greece
Cambodia
England
East Asia
Institutions
Cambridge University
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