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Binding: HardcoverDewey Decimal Number: 610.951 EAN: 9780942299885 Edition: 1 ISBN: 0942299884 Label: Zone Books Manufacturer: Zone Books Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 256 Publication Date: July 23, 1999 Publisher: Zone Books Studio: Zone Books Accessories:
Editorial Review: Amazon.com Review: What are our bodies trying to tell us? In the scholarly yet delicately beautiful The Expressiveness of the Body, Japanese scholar Shigehisa Kuriyama examines two widely divergent traditions of diagnostic examination: Greek and Chinese. While at first glance it would seem that this would entail a straightforward familiar vs. exotic dichotomy for Western readers, only a short way into the book we realize that the ancient Greeks were just as foreign to us as the ancient Chinese. While there is some greater resemblance to modern medicine in the works of Galen and his contemporaries, Kuriyama shows us that their struggle to "decode" the body's signals was just as arbitrary--and just as accurate--as works like the Huangdi Neijing. Showing that the often dramatic differences between their attitudes about signs such as pulse, breath, and blood both developed from and informed deeper beliefs about the nature of the body, Kuriyama exposes the highly subjective artistry of medicine. Like the proverbial blind men feeling the different parts of the elephant, the ancients focused exclusively on one set of traits and signs and developed a complex theoretical framework around it. Well documented and handsomely illustrated, The Expressiveness of the Body pokes and prods into the space between precise anatomical knowledge and the understanding of qi flow to find the rest of the elephant beyond the trunk, legs, and tail. --Rob Lightner Product Description: "...this is an astonishingly original reading of early medicine in China and the West, yet one that builds its case with scrupulous scholarship. . . . A great achievement!" -- Arthur Kleinman, Harvard Medical School At the heart of medical history is a deep enigma. The true structure and workings of the human body are, we casually assume, everywhere the same, a universal reality. But then we look into the past, and our sense of reality wavers: accounts of the body in diverse medical traditions often seem to describe mutually alien, almost unrelated worlds. The Expressiveness of the Body meditates on the contrasts between the human body described in classical Greek medicine and the body as envisaged by physicians in ancient China. It asks how this most basic of human realities came to be conceived by two sophisticated civilizations in radically diverging ways. And it seeks answers in fresh and unexpected topics, such as the history of tactile knowledge, the relationship between ways of seeing and ways of listening, and the evolution of bloodletting. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - Best book on Chinese medicine. Unrivaled explanatory power.This remarkable book accomplishes several things. First, it is a stunningly CLEAR analysis of the fundamental concepts of Chinese medicine. For example: what is the difference between 'pulse analysis' in China and 'taking the pulse' in the West? What is the vision of anatomy in early China? How do doctors conduct an examination? What do they look for, and what do they see? How are the abstract, understated illustrations of Chinese medicine to be read and understood? We find that physicians ... Read More Rating:  - Clear but only within the narrow of scholarly languageThe author is to be commended for doing a service, not only to the medical community, but to all who would seek a greater understanding of how perception feeds and shapes knowledge as such. The prose is elegant, and the subject matter selected and laid out judiciously for the purpose of maximum comparison. The author demonstrates, convincingly that if Eastern Medicine seems strange (and it always did) to Western eyes, Western Medicine is no less so in its peculiar assumptions about the body. All fine ... Read More Rating: - A book of major importanceThis book was given the Award for the Achievement of Excellence in the Spring/Summer 2000 issue of Oriental Medicine Journal. Rating: - lfootemdAnyone who has explored and studied Chinese medicine is struck by the different perspective it offers. For those intrigued by the history behind how western and eastern perceptions diverged so greatly, this book is an excellent start. In a very scholarly fashion SK has drawn on ancient Greek and Chinese texts to dilineate where that split in perception began. Plato's works reflect a view of medicine not unlike the authors of early chinese medicine texts. Later texts by Galen and Hippocrates, however, ... Read More |
