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., illus. $29.50.

Many comparisons of Greek and Chinese medicine seek underlying similarities, a reassurance that rationality will prevail, an assertion that difference might be complementary. Shigehisa Kuriyama’s project, however, moves from common ground to divergence. It would be as fitting to say that his book, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, is about perception and truth as to say it is about ancient medicine, for the divergences he traces stem from fundamental issues of knowing and experiencing.

The book unfolds as a triptych, with its chapters organized into three thematic parts: styles of touching, styles of seeing, and styles of being. The sections ostensibly pair a chapter on the Greek tradition with a chapter on the Chinese, but there is a constant folding and mixing, for the individual chapters each contribute a new perspective on the common question of personhood and perception. To begin, Kuriyama considers the pulse. What seems to be a shared practice in Greek and Chinese medicine is actually not the same at all. Greek and Chinese practitioners who silently grasped patients by the wrist and then made diagnoses were not simply figuring the same objective information into different cultural equations. They were, quite literally, feeling different things for different purposes. “Theoretical preconceptions at once shaped and were shaped by the contours of haptic sensation” (p. 60). Kuriyama then explores the way the Chinese medical understanding of “pulse” arose, concluding that “the history of conceptions of the body must be understood in conjunction with a history of conceptions of communication” (p. 107). How medical practitioners touched the body was intimately related to their search for the language of life and their understanding of the expressiveness of the body.

Styles of seeing were similarly affected. Kuriyama constructs anatomy as a training of medical vision that emerged through the broader association of musculature with voluntary action and agency in Greek culture. In China, however, vision was focused on the perception of se, or color. The cultural metaphor of growing plants and blooming flowers taught Chinese doctors how to interpret signs of human “flourishing” just as representations of muscularity in Greek art shaped images of human vitality. In Kuriyama’s view, both the Greek and the Chinese outlooks, though widely variant, bound ways of seeing the body to notions of personhood and humanness.

The author pushes this link even farther in his section on styles of being, which links medical etiology to ways of imagining the interchange between self and environment. Using blood and breath (“wind”), Kuriyama tracks changes in Chinese and Greek demarcations of internal and external. Over time Greeks began to see excess blood as one of the greatest threats to health, for superfluity could lead to stagnation, which in turn invited disease. In contrast, Chinese medicine was concerned with deficiency and dispersal, for the body’s resources had to be marshaled against the winds of ceaseless change. Both Chinese and Greek medicine stressed that susceptibility to diseases from without depended on the state of the body within, but the two models differed on the ideal quality of internal conditions and the precise nature of the external threat. Reflecting conceptions of self and other, the “history of the body is ultimately a history of ways of inhabiting the world” (p. 237).

This last point is beautifully, lyrically expressed throughout the book. It is perhaps best exemplified in the first section, where the body is most present as both object of study and instrument of investigation. The discussion of pulse emphasizes the active process by which human beings come to understand the body, intertwining imagination and experience. However, for a book that so convincingly...