The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece

"I confess here, I just wanted to pick something by Geoffrey Lloyd, because he’s one of the people who’s been most important to me in thinking about what it is that I do and what it is that interests me. Without him, I would have at many points been less courageous in making decisions for the way I conduct my research. He’s a wonderful guide, and I think this particular work—or any of his works on Greece and China together—is exemplary for its lucidity and sophistication, and for understanding what the comparative method can do and why it’s worth undertaking. Lloyd became a sinologist somewhat late in his career. He was first and foremost a specialist in classical Greek philosophy and science. He, I think reasonably, came to appreciate that you can’t really understand what is truly an innovative, original phenomenon at a local level on the one hand, and what is a local reflection of a universal pattern on the other, unless you’re surveying at least two different cases: you need a comparison in order to understand what is original. I don’t recall if it’s in this book, but at some point, Lloyd talks about the example of studying the pulse. As I recall, in the Chinese medical tradition, the pulse can be described in qualitative colour terms: someone can have a grey pulse or a white pulse, rather than a pulse that happens a certain number of times per minute. This is an interesting example, because we all have basically the same human bodies, with the same beating hearts, with the same pulse. That is, so to speak, a constant . (I’m using this term borrowed from the physical sciences.) It’s a constant of human existence. So, medicine for this reason is a great way to approach a comparative intellectual history because of the certainty that there are underlying human bodies with the same physiology in each case. I work with colleagues in Paris who take a similar approach in mathematics and the history of mathematics, such as my colleague Karine Chemla, who works on classical Chinese mathematics. Did ancient Chinese mathematicians have the concept of proof in the same sense that the Greeks did? That’s another interesting field for a rigorous comparative approach, but the difference is perhaps that we lose the constant. We lose a firm grasp on something we can be sure is always the same. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s even harder when it comes to comparative philosophy, because who on Earth knows when we’re talking about the same category? We really lose our grasp when we start doing comparative philosophy, even across history. But the problem is magnified when we’re skipping both across civilizations and across centuries. For that reason, I think Lloyd’s approach is exactly the right one: to root comparative intellectual history in something as stable as the body, which is studied by medicine. Whether there’s a distinction between medicine and science is more a problem for us than for the people Lloyd studies, because it’s not clear that there’s a fixed concept of science that would be alike in both cases either. This rootedness of Lloyd’s work then is what has enabled him to do some wonderful later work. One of his most impressive more recent books is called Cognitive Variations : it looks at some kinds of very richly studied fields in which we’re able to gauge the cultural universality of certain basic things, like, for example, numbers, colours, the body and a few others, chapter by chapter. He runs through these, and to my mind it’s extremely rich both as anthropology and as philosophy."