The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine

"Our ideas about medicine are based on theories about how our bodies work. Western medicine developed ways of studying the body, blood flow, muscles, and anatomy. The work of classical practitioners like Galen and Andreas Vesalius laid the basis for Western ideas about the body, and thus medicine. Chinese ancient medicine offers a fascinating contrast, a completely different model of how the body worked. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine compares ancient Greek anatomy and medicine with how the body was understood by physicians in ancient China. Kuriyama shows that physicians in China focused less on muscles than pulse and breath. He shows this divergence was part of a broader cultural story, a fundamental schism opening. This schism was expressed in medical treatments, leading the West towards practices like bloodletting and the East towards acupuncture. Kuriyama finds that underlying ideas about volition and the soul also define this split in perceptions of the body. So, the book is about a profound and lasting divergence between Western and Eastern medicine, but it’s also about the role of culture in medicine, in ideas about the body and personhood. It’s a fascinating work. Dying in the City of the Blues is the history of sickle cell disease, a disease associated in the United States with African Americans. It’s characterized by painful episodes and was once was defined by very high childhood mortality. My book examines how, in the US, this disease went from being clinically invisible and ignored in the early 20th century, to becoming clinically and socially important by the end of the 1960s, to becoming a widely known disorder seen as, in a sense, a quintessentially African American health concern. I tell the story of the increasing visibility of a disease and how that visibility is part of the unfolding understanding of African American identity, cultural recognition and health politics across the twentieth century."