The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (review)

Shigehisa Kuriyama. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books, 1999. 340 pp. Ill. $29.50.

This book is written in response to a profound question: "How can perceptions of something as basic and intimate as the body differ so?" (p. 8). Where the Europeans attempted to translate anatomical findings into objective diagnostic parameters, the Chinese perceived the mo and offered metaphoric descriptions of their haptic sensations. Where Europeans saw muscles and depicted them in art and language, the Chinese, Shigehisa Kuriyama claims, did not even develop a word for these morphological structures. Where the Europeans discovered tangible organs, the Chinese perceived the zang and fu. The European and Chinese interpretations of facial colors were not the same, nor did the meanings associated with plethora in Greece and xu (fullness) in China overlap.

Kuriyama's book is a delightful display of erudition, quoting an impressive phalanx of philosophers and medical authorities of ancient Greece and ancient China. His stories would not be so unusual if the book were about religions, table manners, or wedding customs. In discussing the body, however, he has chosen something that most people accept as a tangible reality. To describe and interpret this reality is one task of medicine, and a comparison of ancient Greek with ancient Chinese medicine inevitably invites a judgment from today's perspective: who was closer to "truth"? This, however, is exactly the type of judgment Kuriyama tries to avoid. He writes: "The true structure and workings of the human body are, we casually assume, everywhere the same, a universal reality. But then we look into history, and our sense of reality wavers. . . . Accounts of the body in diverse medical traditions frequently appear to describe mutually alien, almost unrelated worlds" (p. 8). The comparison, he reminds his readers, "compels us to rethink much of what we take for granted in the body" (p. 23)--how much, though, he leaves undecided.

The overarching problem with this book is that it is not so much a meticulous study of historical developments as a comparison of data from two unequal pools. While Greek medicine has been researched by numerous scholars for decades, if not centuries, only a very few aspects of ancient Chinese medical thought have been studied in detail. The Chinese sections of Kuriyama's book are not about "Chinese medicine"; rather, they are about a minority branch of ancient Chinese medical reasoning that happened to dominate the early medicine of systematic correspondences. It is neither representative of "Chinese medicine" in the Han era, nor of "Chinese medicine" in later centuries (or even today).

Even this minority branch was not a homogeneous body of views and notions. The fascinating story of the beginnings of Chinese medicine in a period from the second century B.C. to the third century A.D. is only beginning to unfold, but we already know that it is far more complex than the present book seems to convey. We have come to realize, for example, that the Nanjing was not, as Kuriyama insists, a commentary on the Neijing. The Nanjing, like the presumably later com-pilations of the Suwen and the Lingshu, took its material from an unknown num-ber of short texts written during the Han era. In contrast to the latter two, the Nanjing author heavily edited his material, eliminating internal inconsistencies; the editors of the Suwen and Lingshu only superficially linked their original data, preserving for posterity much of the divergence between individual perspectives.

The first (and least convincing) sections of the book address Greek and Chinese pulse diagnosis. Kuriyama argues that Forke "succumbed to the spell of anatomy, and rendered xuemo as 'blood vessels'" (p. 50), and he suggests that "'streams of blood' is surely the more natural, more exact translation here" (p. 51). ("Xuemo were...