Medicine and the Self in China and in the West

Why is there a history to medicine? We generally assume that the human body was the same in ancient China as it was in ancient Greece, and that it was essentially the same, too, two thousand years ago as it is today. What explains, then, the striking differences in the ways that Chinese and Western doctors perceived this same reality or the great chasm between ancient 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 the 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 self in China and in the West. In the first part of the course, we focus on 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. We then go to 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. The last third of the course is devoted to modern developments. We consider the spread of Western medicine to East Asia and the altered experience of the body that it inspired. But we also ponder the strange and significant but often unnoticed convergence of beliefs in the late nineteenth century—how and why the conceptions of body and mind in modern Western medicine became curiously similar to traditional Chinese conceptions. We conclude our adventure with a glimpse into the possible postmodern futures of our bodies. Students may not take both HSCI E-145 and HSCI E-146 for degree or certificate credit.