Amazon.com
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
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.
Book Description
At the heart of medical history is a deep enigma.
The true structure and workings of the human body are, we casually assume, everywhere the same, a universal reality. But then we look into the past, and our sense of reality wavers: accounts of the body in diverse medical traditions often seem to describe mutually alien, almost unrelated worlds.
The Expressiveness of the Body meditates on the contrasts between the human body described in classical Greek medicine and the body as envisaged by physicians in ancient China. It asks how this most basic of human realities came to be conceived by two sophisticated civilizations in radically diverging ways. And it seeks answers in fresh and unexpected topics, such as the history of tactile knowledge, the relationship between ways of seeing and ways of listening, and the evolution of bloodletting.
Book Info
(Zone Books) International Research Center for Japanese Studies. Offers a history of ancient beliefs about the body and an account of different ways of inhabiting the world. Compares perceptions of human structure and functioning in ancient Greece and China. Includes a list of Japanese and Chinese names and terms.
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