JournalTOCs School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, EH14 4AS, UK Email: journaltocs@hw.ac.uk Tel: +00 44 (0)131 4513762  Your IP address: 18.207.160.97 |
JournalTOCs School of Mathematical and Computer Sciences Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh, EH14 4AS, UK Email: journaltocs@hw.ac.uk Tel: +00 44 (0)131 4513762 Your IP address: 18.207.160.97 |
Open Access journal
No abstract available
This article shares preliminary results from current research on Chinese medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, a city in the American South known both as “Music City, USA” and “The Buckle of the Bible Belt.” The author has interviewed dozens of patients and practitioners in Nashville to understand how Chinese medicine came to the city, what styles of practice are present, and whether or not new understandings of Chinese medicine’s fundamental concept of qi might emerge from the unique cultural setting of the American South. While Chinese medicine is flourishing in the city, because of complexities at the intersection of religion, science, and the experience of healing, the clinical encounter between patients and practitioners is not typically characterized by a mutual embrace of a language of qi.
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 third part “Expanded Frame” deploys some concepts from cognitive science to help situate Chinese medical hand mnemonics more broadly as an example of extended cognition. The essay concludes with an important distinction: sometimes Chinese healers’ hands were used separately from their bodies to think through things and sometimes hand and body had to be integrated in order for the healer’s body-as-technology to act as a therapeutically effective instrument.
In the past few years, the medical knowledge transfer in a West-East direction has attracted increased scholarly attention from European and American historians, whereas studies on such “knowledge travels” conducted in the East Asian context focus mainly on political and socio-cultural concepts. To provide an alternative perspective on the travel of Western medicine to Chinese soil, a case study on “diabetes” is conducted, under the theoretical framework of “transcultural conceptual history.” This article systematically analyzes the standardization, popularization, politicization, and derivatization of “diabetes,” calling for further attention to transcultural histories of medical concepts in modern China.
Singlo tea was not only highly sought after in China but also gained substantial popularity in Europe during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. From European primary sources spanning the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the popularity of Singlo tea in Europe may have been attributed to the fascination with exotic fashions and products, as well as its medicinal properties. As a result of its popularity, Singlo became known as standard green tea. This kind of tea was eventually replaced by green and black teas of other varieties. Based on the case study of Singlo, this essay indicated that Europeans showed more interest in green tea than in black tea in the early period of Sino-European tea trade. However, Singlo was eventually replaced by other kinds of green and black tea. Its decline in European markets also marked the beginning of black tea’s gradual dominance in the Sino-European tea trade. The spread history of Singlo tea in Europe showed how medicine and commerce interacted. It provided an opportunity to learn about Chinese medicine and culture from a foreign perspective.
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No abstract available
During the COVID-19 pandemic, a multitude of narratives saturated the print, audiovisual, and electronic media. Improvised, uninformed, apocalyptic and voluntarist approaches abounded. These notes – written during the pandemic and delivered in the conference series – address the proliferation of such discourses, emphasizing a series of issues. First, the widespread ignorance about the history of epidemics. Then, the inability to deal with the uncertainties that reign during pandemic times, as well as the announcements that this extraordinary health/sanitary event would produce a profound watershed in all walks of life and in all corners of the world. Finally, and against the general assertion that “one learns from the past to understand the present,” these notes seek to point out how the present can illuminate the study of the past – or, more personally, what I think I have learned as a historian in the times of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article investigates the word Du (毒) in premodern Chinese medicine and culture. It highlights the paradoxical meaning of the word that served as a foundation for the therapeutic use of poisons in traditional Chinese medicine. The article then situates the study in a comparative framework. By comparing the Chinese notion of Du with the Greek concept of pharmakon, it demonstrates significant similarities on the medical use of poisons in the two cultures. It further identifies a striking difference: While the European pharmacy started to separate poisons from medicines in the medieval era, poisons remained an integral part of healing repertoire throughout imperial China. The article ends with offering some cultural explanations for this divergence, and more broadly, a distinct worldview as revealed by the intimate relationship between poisons and medicines in traditional Chinese pharmacy.
This essay articulates a new conceptual distinction – that between repertories and habits – and urges that the history of habits is the most critical unknown in the study of Chinese medical history.
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