The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine – March 15, 2002

The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine Paperback – March 15, 2002

Author: Visit Amazon's Shigehisa Kuriyama Page | Language: English | ISBN: 0942299892 | Format: PDF, EPUB

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The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine – March 15, 2002
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What are our bodies trying to tell us? In the scholarly yet delicately beautiful The Expressiveness of the Body, Japanese scholar Shigehisa Kuriyama examines two widely divergent traditions of diagnostic examination: Greek and Chinese. While at first glance it would seem that this would entail a straightforward familiar vs. exotic dichotomy for Western readers, only a short way into the book we realize that the ancient Greeks were just as foreign to us as the ancient Chinese. While there is some greater resemblance to modern medicine in the works of Galen and his contemporaries, Kuriyama shows us that their struggle to "decode" the body's signals was just as arbitrary--and just as accurate--as works like the Huangdi Neijing.

Showing that the often dramatic differences between their attitudes about signs such as pulse, breath, and blood both developed from and informed deeper beliefs about the nature of the body, Kuriyama exposes the highly subjective artistry of medicine. Like the proverbial blind men feeling the different parts of the elephant, the ancients focused exclusively on one set of traits and signs and developed a complex theoretical framework around it. Well documented and handsomely illustrated, The Expressiveness of the Body pokes and prods into the space between precise anatomical knowledge and the understanding of qi flow to find the rest of the elephant beyond the trunk, legs, and tail. --Rob Lightner --This text refers to the

Hardcover
edition.

From Library Journal

In his first book, Kuriyama (International Research Ctr. for Japanese Studies) explores cultural perception through an examination of the historical roots of medicine, tracing a fundamental questionAhow does the body work?Ato ancient Eastern and Western sources. Kuriyama finds widely different perspectives in the Greek and Chinese medical models, expressed through language, touch, sight, breath, and identity. He compares the Western emphasis on anatomy and muscle with the Eastern focus on more sensory aspects: pulse, color, and so on. Ultimately, Kuriyama challenges the notion of a fixed and definite answer to the question and to truth itself. Although the themes of this book have popular appeal, its scholarly nature makes it more suitable for academic or comparative/historical medicine collections.AAndy Wickens, Univ. of Illinois-Chicago Lib. of the Health Sciences
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the

Hardcover
edition.

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Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Zone Books; Reprint edition (March 15, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0942299892
ISBN-13: 978-0942299892
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #175,754 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #65 in Books > Textbooks > Medicine & Health Sciences > Medicine > Special Topics > History

The author is to be commended for doing a service, not only to the medical community, but to all who would seek a greater understanding of how perception feeds and shapes knowledge as such. The prose is elegant, and the subject matter selected and laid out judiciously for the purpose of maximum comparison. The author demonstrates, convincingly that if Eastern Medicine seems strange (and it always did) to Western eyes, Western Medicine is no less so in its peculiar assumptions about the body. All fine and good, BUT... The reason I give it four stars is that there is a lacuna in the logic of comparison here. The design of the study intended to do a one-on-one comparison necessarily restricts the theme drastically. What is seriously lacking is a treatment of the influence on the development of Chinese medicine of Taoist yoga and other esoteric techniques concerning the body, techniques well articulated during the Former Han Dynasty (ca. 200 BCE). The Helenic Civilization, and the West in general, is distinguished from the East by virtue of its lack of systematic techniques of mind-body control, the likes of which may be found in yoga and the various martial arts of the Chinese variety. It seems reasonable to assume that a martial arts technique has to be grounded in a particular, but thorough understanding of the body. And indeed, much of Chinese martial arts and yoga techniques, and medicine are based on experience of things not within the ken of Western modes of perception -- The notion of the ethereal body and various modes of consciousness,for example. But, alas, so much of what is within Chinese medicine and experience remains unmeasured and perhaps unmeasurable by modern Western medical episteme.