{"id":8057,"date":"2015-12-03T11:00:55","date_gmt":"2015-12-03T16:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/?p=8057"},"modified":"2024-09-26T13:02:41","modified_gmt":"2024-09-26T17:02:41","slug":"wrapped-in-flesh-views-of-the-body-in-east-asian-medicine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/2015\/12\/03\/wrapped-in-flesh-views-of-the-body-in-east-asian-medicine\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWrapped in flesh\u201d: Views of the body in East Asian Medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Yi-Li Wu. Dr. Wu is a Center Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, and a Research Fellow of EASTmedicine, University of Westminster and an organizer of the recent workshop Comparative perspectives on body materiality and structure in the history of Sinitic and East Asian medicines<\/a>. Today she explores some of the topics discussed at the workshop.<\/em><\/p>\n

How do you assess the state of a broken bone when you can\u2019t directly see it? Writing in 1808, Chinese doctor Qian Xiuchang discussed a problem shared by healers world-wide prior to the X-ray age: \u201cWhen someone has a dislocated or fractured bone, the bone and joint are wrapped in flesh. Looking at it from the exterior, it is hard to get a clear understanding, and there is the danger of making an error.\u201d To improve the state of bonesetting knowledge, Qian compiled Supplemented Essentials on Medicine for Injuries<\/em><\/a> (Shangke buyao<\/em>). That book can be found in the collection of the National Library of Medicine and is now accessible online.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/a>
Skeleton diagram, back view, from Qian Xiuchang, Supplemented Essentials of Medicine for Injuries, 1818, first printed 1808. National Library of Medicine #46810390R <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>
\"A <\/a>
Skeleton diagram, front view, from Qian Xiuchang, Supplemented Essentials of Medicine for Injuries, 1818, first printed 1808. National Library of Medicine #46810390R <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n

An innovative feature of Qian\u2019s text is that it includes two drawings of the human skeleton, shown from the front and the back. Chinese medical texts had long included written descriptions of the body\u2019s \u201cbones\u201d (gu<\/em>), a term that included individual bones as well as palpable bony landmarks. These were particularly important in acupuncture, where practitioners used them as reference points to locate the spots where needles could be inserted. Some acupuncture diagrams also outlined the positions of major bones. However, prior to the nineteenth century, Chinese texts on therapeutic medicine did not contain diagrams of the full skeleton. In 1742, when the Imperial Medical Academy compiled a textbook on bonesetting, the illustrations only indicated the position of bones by labels on the outside of human figures. In 1770, however, the Qing imperial government promulgated a set of official inquest forms in order to standardize forensic investigations on skeletal remains. It was these forensic diagrams of the skeleton that Qian Xiuchang borrowed and reproduced in his work on treating injuries, so that readers could more easily learn the forms of bones hidden beneath the skin.<\/p>\n

Qian Xiuchang, a native of Shanghai, had received some degree of classical education and he had presumably once aspired to success in the civil service examinations that defined members of the Chinese socio-political elite. He became interested in injury medicine after he broke his leg. He apprenticed with the doctor who cured him and eventually became successful enough to attract disciples of his own. Seven of them helped to collate his Supplemented Essentials<\/em>, which discussed a wide range of traumatic injuries caused by weapons, blows, and falls. It also featured a laudatory preface from Su Chang\u2019a, a former Shanghai magistrate who became a supporter after Qian saved the life of a prisoner who had attempted suicide.<\/p>\n

It was an era when the Chinese were critically re-evaluating received teachings, including those on medicine. At the time that Qian\u2019s text was printed, another doctor, Hu Tinguang, was completing his own manuscript on injury medicine and also incorporated forensic diagrams of the skeleton. Both books sought to address the shortcomings of the imperial bonesetting manual. Besides using forensic medicine\u2014and diagrams of the human skeleton\u2014to improve their readers\u2019 knowledge of the bones, they also incorporated forensic teachings on \u201cmortal points,\u201d namely spots on the body where injuries were particularly dangerous.<\/p>\n

Qian\u2019s Supplemented Essentials <\/em>thus leads us to consider an understudied aspect of East Asian medical history: how doctors investigated and understood the body\u2019s material structures and components. The present-day view is that \u201ctraditional Chinese medicine\u201d is primarily interested in the body\u2019s energies and vital functions and not in anatomy or body structures. Historically, however, that was not precisely the case. East Asian healers argued about how to define the parts of the body and their relation to health, injury, and disease, and like Qian Xiuchang, pursued different methods for improving their knowledge of the body: textual study and introspection, the dissection and observation of corpses, careful observation of healthy and diseased people.<\/p>\n

These issues took center stage at an extraordinary workshop. Held October 2-4, 2015 at the University of Michigan, Comparative perspectives on body materiality and structure in the history of Sinitic and East Asian medicines<\/em><\/a> brought together an international group of scholars (including historian Michael Sappol of the National Library of Medicine) to discuss medical portrayals and practices of the body, from the first century A.D. to the nineteenth, in China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, the Mongol Empire, and Tibet.<\/p>\n

\"Three<\/a>
Medical painting showing blood vessels, \u201cchannels\u201d of the body, and internal organs. This thangka was the tenth of 79 illustrations that regent Sangye Gyamtso (1653\u20131705) commissioned for his famous treatise, The Blue Beryl<\/em>.
Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The workshop explored a number of questions. How did different representations of the body co-exist with each other within a given cultural context? The anatomical images and descriptions in Tibetan medical treatises, for example, included those based on examination of corpses as well as those elaborating humoral and vitalistic beliefs and those metaphorically comparing the body\u2019s components to a palace or to a kingdom\u2019s rulers and ministers . Different body views were linked to different explanations for how and why illness afflicted the body, and to different therapeutic methods.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
\u201cInternal landscape\u201d, Zhang Jiebin, Illustrated Wing to the \u201cClassic, Arranged by Category\u201d, (Leijing tu yi, 1624). Zhang re\u00acvised older images by adding a new organ between the rectum and bladder, claiming that this was the true location of the so-called \u201cvital gate.\u201d
Courtesy of the Chinese Collection, Harvard-Yenching Library, copyright President and Fellows of Harvard College<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Competing images of the internal organs circulated in China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, and were the subject of debates about how internal structures were connected to each other and to imagined centers of primordial vitality.<\/p>\n

The conference also explored the status and value assigned to medical illustration compared to textual descriptions of the body, and how visual conventions from various realms of medicine influenced each other. In early nineteenth-century Japan, for example, both the bonesetting expert Kako Ry\u014dgen (1810) and the surgeon Hanaoka Seish\u016b (1760\u20131835) employed images in which the body\u2019s flesh was transparent or invisible. Finally, the conference highlighted the historical importance of surgery, bone setting, and other manual therapies that required healers to physically manipulate the body\u2019s components.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
Breast cancer surgery, Hanaoka Seish\u016b (1760\u20131835), Illustrated book on external treatments for unusual diseases (Kishitsu gery\u014d zukan)<\/em><\/a>.
National Library of Medicine #101147736<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The rich diversity of presentations, the wealth of ideas and material, and the lively discussions that ensued, showed the creative vigor of contemporary scholarship on East Asian medicine, enormously facilitated by the increasing number of rare books and manuscripts that have been digitized by the National Library of Medicine and other libraries and made accessible online for researchers throughout the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Circulating Now welcomes guest blogger Yi-Li Wu. Dr. Wu is a Center Associate of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19605840,"featured_media":8086,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"\u201cWrapped in flesh\u201d: Views of the body in East Asian Medicine - Guest blogger Dr. Yi-Li Wu explores Chinese medical history","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12763,51014,103,347145303],"tags":[411245,273905,26371,1470,32035,57544],"class_list":["post-8057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-collections","category-guests","category-news","category-rare-books-journals","tag-1700s","tag-1800s","tag-anatomy","tag-china","tag-forensic","tag-surgery"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/33breast_feature.png?fit=932%2C360&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3xcDk-25X","jetpack-related-posts":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8057","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19605840"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8057"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8057\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34527,"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8057\/revisions\/34527"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8057"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8057"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/circulatingnow.nlm.nih.gov\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8057"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}