Course description
Why is there a history to medicine? We generally assume that the human body in ancient Greece or China was essentially the same as our own bodies today. What explains, then, the striking differences between Greek medicine and Chinese medicine, traditional medicine and modern medicine? How can we understand the astounding historical diversity of medical beliefs and practices, when we believe the human body to be one and unique? This is arguably the most fundamental puzzle of the history of medicine, and it is puzzle at the heart of this course. We explore this puzzle through the specific lens of the history of medicine and the body in East Asia and in Europe. At the outset we spotlight questions of contrast and radical difference. We study, for instance, why imagining a body mapped by acupuncture points uniquely made sense in China, and why muscles came to loom so large in the imagination of the body in the West—and only in the West. But we also trace the fascinating history of connections that eventually developed between the two medical traditions—how Chinese tea, for example, became an indispensable drink in the West and American ginseng came to be widely consumed in China. And we conclude by meditating on the strange and significant, but often unnoticed convergence of beliefs today—on how and why the conceptions of body and mind in modern Western medicine often seem curiously similar to traditional Chinese conceptions.
