Shifting focus from the patient’s body to the healer’s body, this essay focuses on how Chinese ph... more Shifting focus from the patient’s body to the healer’s body, this essay focuses on how Chinese physicians instrumentalized their bodies to heal (ie, body-as-technology) and their hands to think with (ie, hand-memory techniques or simply, hand mnemonics). When physicians used their hands to memorize concepts related to clinical practice, calculate with time variables, and carry out ritual gestures intended to reduce risk, improve fortune, and even cure, their hands became extensions of their minds. This essay has three parts that follow the discovery process of the author’s research on hand-memory techniques found in Chinese medical texts. The first part “Divination and Revelation” explains the significance of how the author first learned about Chinese divination practices that used hand mnemonics. The second part “Original Frame” introduces the scholarship on arts of memory in Europe that informed interpretations of the earliest hand mnemonics found in Chinese medical texts. The thi...
In 2001, internist and literary scholar Rita Charon at Columbia University famously announced a n... more In 2001, internist and literary scholar Rita Charon at Columbia University famously announced a new discipline called narrative medicine. She based it on the premise that the basic humanistic skills of critical reading, slow looking, and reflective writing were as necessary for developing clinical skills as evidence-based medical knowledge. Already by 2011, the new discipline of narrative medicine had taken root in China through published articles and a meeting at the Institute for Medical Humanities (now School of Health Humanities) in Peking University. Just a decade later, narrative medicine programs have not only proliferated in medical schools and hospitals across China but they have also developed into novel programs of "narrative medicine with Chinese characteristics." After two decades in the United States and just over one decade in China, the time has come to take stock of their parallel but different histories. It is also time to evaluate what is distinct about narrative medicine programs in China. After two decades of exploring mostly western literature, artwork, and film for narrative medicine programs, scholars have also begun to consider Chinese textual, visual, and performative resources that can be used as well to develop narrative competence. The 10 articles in this special issue of Chinese Medicine and Culture on "narrative medicine in China and Chinese sources for narrative medicine" fall under five broad categories: (1) Introducing to a Chinese audience AfterWards, a specific narrative medicine program established in 2014 at Johns Hopkins University (Small); (2) Summing up the recent history of narrative medicine in China and what makes
This paper focuses on Chinese sources suggested for a narrative medicine (NM) program, called Aft... more This paper focuses on Chinese sources suggested for a narrative medicine (NM) program, called AfterWards. Dr Lauren Small established AfterWards in 2014 and has been coordinating it since out of the Pediatrics Department at Johns Hopkins Medicine. In early 2019, she started giving a series of lectures and workshops about AfterWards to Chinese medical educators and clinicians in Beijing and Shanghai. She created an AfterWards Facilitator’s Guide based on Western-language sources for workshop participants. She also started to organize with Jiang Yuhong (Peking Union Medical College) a workshop for Chinese colleagues to be held at Johns Hopkins Medicine in October 2019. They invited the author to participate. The idea was hatched then to develop Chinese source materials following the AfterWards structure for an updated Facilitator’s Guide that Dr Small had initially written. A typical one-hour AfterWards session consists of a specific five-part structure: a literary text or artwork, an...
East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, 2002
Her research focuses on the following two projects: 1) early-modern medical conceptions of climat... more Her research focuses on the following two projects: 1) early-modern medical conceptions of climatology, geography, and regional physiology for a book titled Chinese Medical Geographies and 2) the practice of hand mnemonics, calculation, and divination in Chinese culture for a book titled Understanding is Within One's Grasp.]
The previous chapter concluded with two clear themes: (1) historical actors as well as historians... more The previous chapter concluded with two clear themes: (1) historical actors as well as historians, demographers, and anthropologists have wrestled with retrospective diagnosis of epidemic diseases, revealing in the process that disease concepts had complex histories as much in the past as they do today; and (2) historical actors and modern scholars alike have found epidemics to be useful as a diagnostic lens on contemporary problems, whether as fault lines in the moral economy, as fssures in social order, or as failures in governance. While both of these key themes continue into the present, the scholarship on late imperial epidemiology from the 1980s to the present markedly difers from that of the previous century in terms of both conceptual and material methods. ('Material methods' refers to extant primary sources; 'conceptual methods' refers to how people interpret them.) From late nineteenth-century Western physicians to 1970s historians of Chinese demography, for example, the history of late imperial epidemiology was dominated conceptually by a naturalist-realist perspective. From the 1980s onwards, however, medical historians have increasingly explored late imperial Chinese epidemiology from the historical-conceptual side of the spectrum. As for material methods, historical records of epidemics created by Chinese administrators (from dynastic histories to local gazetteers and jottings), religious leaders (from tracts on doctrines to rituals and liturgy), and medical authorities (from treatises to case records) constituted the primary-source foundation for the former period. From the 1980s onwards, however, geneticists began to develop means to extract human and bacterial DNA (aDNA) from ancient remains, and so bring new evidence into the conversations about the global history of epidemics. The resulting new feld of paleomicrobiology since the 1990s has analysed ancient DNA (aDNA) in ways that confrmed, for example, the retrospective diagnoses of a range of infectious diseases from tuberculosis in ancient Egypt to plague in fourteenth-century Europe and infuenza in the US during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Furthermore, scientifc research on the history of non-human diseases and even viruses has developed additional evidence that medical historians may both historicise and integrate into new global histories of disease in non-human as well as human populations. By 1997, one also fnds the full range of conceptual methods applied to the history of late imperial Chinese epidemiology, when one medical historian applied retrospective
From the beginning of recorded history, human beings have encountered epidemics. They have also m... more From the beginning of recorded history, human beings have encountered epidemics. They have also memorialized these events, which can be deeply traumatic and scarring, in visual art and literature. In this article, we look at a selection of artistic depictions of past epidemics in Western culture in light of what they can teach us about COVID-19 today. Our analysis reveals that while responses to epidemics are culturally bound to specific times and places, they also share common features. What surfaces again and again are pandemic patterns: persistent themes, such as divine revelation, "othering," freedom, and exile, girded by a four-part dramaturgical structure as originally articulated by medical historian Charles Rosenberg. We argue that our response to COVID-19 is neither uniformly progressive nor linear, but rather circular or overlapping in time and space. COVID-19 may feel new to us, but in important ways, it is quite old. It has awoken an ancient and durable human script, laid out and reenacted over thousands of years. Understanding these pandemic patterns may help clinicians and health policy makers alike better craft a response to COVID-19 today and to the future epidemics that undoubtedly will come.
This article focuses on transformations in the main metaphors in ancient to late medieval titles ... more This article focuses on transformations in the main metaphors in ancient to late medieval titles of Chinese medical books used to convey to potential readers their ‘learning-by-the-book’ contents. It finds that in contrast to the European preference for hand metaphors in the genre terms – enchiridions, manuals and handbooks – the Chinese medical archive preserves bodily metaphors within which the hand metaphor appears only rarely in the early medieval period and is then superseded by metaphors that rely on the fingers and palms more than the hands per se. This longue durée survey from roughly the fourth to the fourteenth centuries of the wide-ranging metaphors for ‘handy medical books’ places their historical emergence and transformation within the history of Chinese medical manuscripts and printed texts. Metaphors in medical titles conveyed to potential readers at the time significant textual innovations in how medical knowledge would be presented to them. For later historians, the...
East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, 2017
Catherine Jami (ed.), "Mobilité Humaine et Circulation des Savoirs Techniques (XVIIe-XIXe Siècle)... more Catherine Jami (ed.), "Mobilité Humaine et Circulation des Savoirs Techniques (XVIIe-XIXe Siècle)-Human Mobility and the Circulation of Technical Knowledge (17 th-19 th Centuries)," Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes) 36 (2013), 224 pp.
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2019
caused by the translation. At times the linguistic confusion verges on the surreal: the Tibetan K... more caused by the translation. At times the linguistic confusion verges on the surreal: the Tibetan Kagyu pa use of scriptural teaching 經教 is rendered as “tsunenori” as though it were a Japanese name (p. 69), and a similar lapse on p. 194 gives us the mystic statement “thorough exploration of the logos and the intrinsic character meant immeasurable yoshisada”, which turns out to represent 窮理盡性,謂無量義定, a pair of phrases that is furthermore falsely attributed to the Lotus Sutra when Fang’s text makes clear that it is from a commentary. Reference likewise to “Taisho Tibetan” on p. 211, n. 1, for 大正蔵 points to something very badly amiss, especially after 理不可分 is translated “Li is irresistible” in the same footnote. Only machine translation, I suspect, could produce results as mindless as these, which leads me to conclude that the underlying text of Fang’s work was fed into a machine, and that some hapless editorial helpers were then hired to try to sort out the results. They failed. Not ever...
Why write about maps of disease? The history of map making and cartography are of general interes... more Why write about maps of disease? The history of map making and cartography are of general interest; certainly, there are plenty of books on the subject for maps of the world and within China, but medical maps? They are most interesting when read as ways of thinking through problems. From the beginning, medical mapping was not just a way of thinking but also a way to visualize current conceptions of knowledge. Their authors may use them as statements in an argument or as evidence furthering a specific hypothesis. In these cases, they function to visualize a possible causal relationship. On the one hand, disease incidence, and on the other, causes—the climate or weather, water and air quality, geological features such as elevation, waterways and mountains, or something else, such as an unknown poison or contaminant in the environment. Researchers often use them to think through the relationship between the nature of any given disease and the specific environment that produced it. 1
Asian Medicine is inaugurating a new type of article in this issue, the pedagogical forum. For ou... more Asian Medicine is inaugurating a new type of article in this issue, the pedagogical forum. For our launch of this new format, forum editors Zanolini and Hanson invited a range of scholars and practitioners teaching East Asian medicine within diverse institutional contexts to contribute. Their different approaches to teaching can be more broadly applied to any medical tradition in Asia.
China was once mocked by Westerners as the “Sick Man of Asia.” That caricature provided motivatio... more China was once mocked by Westerners as the “Sick Man of Asia.” That caricature provided motivation for a long campaign of national rejuvenation. Now the tables are turned after China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic proved more effective than that of the United States and other Western nations.
Shifting focus from the patient’s body to the healer’s body, this essay focuses on how Chinese ph... more Shifting focus from the patient’s body to the healer’s body, this essay focuses on how Chinese physicians instrumentalized their bodies to heal (ie, body-as-technology) and their hands to think with (ie, hand-memory techniques or simply, hand mnemonics). When physicians used their hands to memorize concepts related to clinical practice, calculate with time variables, and carry out ritual gestures intended to reduce risk, improve fortune, and even cure, their hands became extensions of their minds. This essay has three parts that follow the discovery process of the author’s research on hand-memory techniques found in Chinese medical texts. The first part “Divination and Revelation” explains the significance of how the author first learned about Chinese divination practices that used hand mnemonics. The second part “Original Frame” introduces the scholarship on arts of memory in Europe that informed interpretations of the earliest hand mnemonics found in Chinese medical texts. The thi...
In 2001, internist and literary scholar Rita Charon at Columbia University famously announced a n... more In 2001, internist and literary scholar Rita Charon at Columbia University famously announced a new discipline called narrative medicine. She based it on the premise that the basic humanistic skills of critical reading, slow looking, and reflective writing were as necessary for developing clinical skills as evidence-based medical knowledge. Already by 2011, the new discipline of narrative medicine had taken root in China through published articles and a meeting at the Institute for Medical Humanities (now School of Health Humanities) in Peking University. Just a decade later, narrative medicine programs have not only proliferated in medical schools and hospitals across China but they have also developed into novel programs of "narrative medicine with Chinese characteristics." After two decades in the United States and just over one decade in China, the time has come to take stock of their parallel but different histories. It is also time to evaluate what is distinct about narrative medicine programs in China. After two decades of exploring mostly western literature, artwork, and film for narrative medicine programs, scholars have also begun to consider Chinese textual, visual, and performative resources that can be used as well to develop narrative competence. The 10 articles in this special issue of Chinese Medicine and Culture on "narrative medicine in China and Chinese sources for narrative medicine" fall under five broad categories: (1) Introducing to a Chinese audience AfterWards, a specific narrative medicine program established in 2014 at Johns Hopkins University (Small); (2) Summing up the recent history of narrative medicine in China and what makes
This paper focuses on Chinese sources suggested for a narrative medicine (NM) program, called Aft... more This paper focuses on Chinese sources suggested for a narrative medicine (NM) program, called AfterWards. Dr Lauren Small established AfterWards in 2014 and has been coordinating it since out of the Pediatrics Department at Johns Hopkins Medicine. In early 2019, she started giving a series of lectures and workshops about AfterWards to Chinese medical educators and clinicians in Beijing and Shanghai. She created an AfterWards Facilitator’s Guide based on Western-language sources for workshop participants. She also started to organize with Jiang Yuhong (Peking Union Medical College) a workshop for Chinese colleagues to be held at Johns Hopkins Medicine in October 2019. They invited the author to participate. The idea was hatched then to develop Chinese source materials following the AfterWards structure for an updated Facilitator’s Guide that Dr Small had initially written. A typical one-hour AfterWards session consists of a specific five-part structure: a literary text or artwork, an...
East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, 2002
Her research focuses on the following two projects: 1) early-modern medical conceptions of climat... more Her research focuses on the following two projects: 1) early-modern medical conceptions of climatology, geography, and regional physiology for a book titled Chinese Medical Geographies and 2) the practice of hand mnemonics, calculation, and divination in Chinese culture for a book titled Understanding is Within One's Grasp.]
The previous chapter concluded with two clear themes: (1) historical actors as well as historians... more The previous chapter concluded with two clear themes: (1) historical actors as well as historians, demographers, and anthropologists have wrestled with retrospective diagnosis of epidemic diseases, revealing in the process that disease concepts had complex histories as much in the past as they do today; and (2) historical actors and modern scholars alike have found epidemics to be useful as a diagnostic lens on contemporary problems, whether as fault lines in the moral economy, as fssures in social order, or as failures in governance. While both of these key themes continue into the present, the scholarship on late imperial epidemiology from the 1980s to the present markedly difers from that of the previous century in terms of both conceptual and material methods. ('Material methods' refers to extant primary sources; 'conceptual methods' refers to how people interpret them.) From late nineteenth-century Western physicians to 1970s historians of Chinese demography, for example, the history of late imperial epidemiology was dominated conceptually by a naturalist-realist perspective. From the 1980s onwards, however, medical historians have increasingly explored late imperial Chinese epidemiology from the historical-conceptual side of the spectrum. As for material methods, historical records of epidemics created by Chinese administrators (from dynastic histories to local gazetteers and jottings), religious leaders (from tracts on doctrines to rituals and liturgy), and medical authorities (from treatises to case records) constituted the primary-source foundation for the former period. From the 1980s onwards, however, geneticists began to develop means to extract human and bacterial DNA (aDNA) from ancient remains, and so bring new evidence into the conversations about the global history of epidemics. The resulting new feld of paleomicrobiology since the 1990s has analysed ancient DNA (aDNA) in ways that confrmed, for example, the retrospective diagnoses of a range of infectious diseases from tuberculosis in ancient Egypt to plague in fourteenth-century Europe and infuenza in the US during the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Furthermore, scientifc research on the history of non-human diseases and even viruses has developed additional evidence that medical historians may both historicise and integrate into new global histories of disease in non-human as well as human populations. By 1997, one also fnds the full range of conceptual methods applied to the history of late imperial Chinese epidemiology, when one medical historian applied retrospective
From the beginning of recorded history, human beings have encountered epidemics. They have also m... more From the beginning of recorded history, human beings have encountered epidemics. They have also memorialized these events, which can be deeply traumatic and scarring, in visual art and literature. In this article, we look at a selection of artistic depictions of past epidemics in Western culture in light of what they can teach us about COVID-19 today. Our analysis reveals that while responses to epidemics are culturally bound to specific times and places, they also share common features. What surfaces again and again are pandemic patterns: persistent themes, such as divine revelation, "othering," freedom, and exile, girded by a four-part dramaturgical structure as originally articulated by medical historian Charles Rosenberg. We argue that our response to COVID-19 is neither uniformly progressive nor linear, but rather circular or overlapping in time and space. COVID-19 may feel new to us, but in important ways, it is quite old. It has awoken an ancient and durable human script, laid out and reenacted over thousands of years. Understanding these pandemic patterns may help clinicians and health policy makers alike better craft a response to COVID-19 today and to the future epidemics that undoubtedly will come.
This article focuses on transformations in the main metaphors in ancient to late medieval titles ... more This article focuses on transformations in the main metaphors in ancient to late medieval titles of Chinese medical books used to convey to potential readers their ‘learning-by-the-book’ contents. It finds that in contrast to the European preference for hand metaphors in the genre terms – enchiridions, manuals and handbooks – the Chinese medical archive preserves bodily metaphors within which the hand metaphor appears only rarely in the early medieval period and is then superseded by metaphors that rely on the fingers and palms more than the hands per se. This longue durée survey from roughly the fourth to the fourteenth centuries of the wide-ranging metaphors for ‘handy medical books’ places their historical emergence and transformation within the history of Chinese medical manuscripts and printed texts. Metaphors in medical titles conveyed to potential readers at the time significant textual innovations in how medical knowledge would be presented to them. For later historians, the...
East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, 2017
Catherine Jami (ed.), "Mobilité Humaine et Circulation des Savoirs Techniques (XVIIe-XIXe Siècle)... more Catherine Jami (ed.), "Mobilité Humaine et Circulation des Savoirs Techniques (XVIIe-XIXe Siècle)-Human Mobility and the Circulation of Technical Knowledge (17 th-19 th Centuries)," Extrême-Orient Extrême-Occident (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes) 36 (2013), 224 pp.
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 2019
caused by the translation. At times the linguistic confusion verges on the surreal: the Tibetan K... more caused by the translation. At times the linguistic confusion verges on the surreal: the Tibetan Kagyu pa use of scriptural teaching 經教 is rendered as “tsunenori” as though it were a Japanese name (p. 69), and a similar lapse on p. 194 gives us the mystic statement “thorough exploration of the logos and the intrinsic character meant immeasurable yoshisada”, which turns out to represent 窮理盡性,謂無量義定, a pair of phrases that is furthermore falsely attributed to the Lotus Sutra when Fang’s text makes clear that it is from a commentary. Reference likewise to “Taisho Tibetan” on p. 211, n. 1, for 大正蔵 points to something very badly amiss, especially after 理不可分 is translated “Li is irresistible” in the same footnote. Only machine translation, I suspect, could produce results as mindless as these, which leads me to conclude that the underlying text of Fang’s work was fed into a machine, and that some hapless editorial helpers were then hired to try to sort out the results. They failed. Not ever...
Why write about maps of disease? The history of map making and cartography are of general interes... more Why write about maps of disease? The history of map making and cartography are of general interest; certainly, there are plenty of books on the subject for maps of the world and within China, but medical maps? They are most interesting when read as ways of thinking through problems. From the beginning, medical mapping was not just a way of thinking but also a way to visualize current conceptions of knowledge. Their authors may use them as statements in an argument or as evidence furthering a specific hypothesis. In these cases, they function to visualize a possible causal relationship. On the one hand, disease incidence, and on the other, causes—the climate or weather, water and air quality, geological features such as elevation, waterways and mountains, or something else, such as an unknown poison or contaminant in the environment. Researchers often use them to think through the relationship between the nature of any given disease and the specific environment that produced it. 1
Asian Medicine is inaugurating a new type of article in this issue, the pedagogical forum. For ou... more Asian Medicine is inaugurating a new type of article in this issue, the pedagogical forum. For our launch of this new format, forum editors Zanolini and Hanson invited a range of scholars and practitioners teaching East Asian medicine within diverse institutional contexts to contribute. Their different approaches to teaching can be more broadly applied to any medical tradition in Asia.
China was once mocked by Westerners as the “Sick Man of Asia.” That caricature provided motivatio... more China was once mocked by Westerners as the “Sick Man of Asia.” That caricature provided motivation for a long campaign of national rejuvenation. Now the tables are turned after China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic proved more effective than that of the United States and other Western nations.
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