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

Shigeshisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone, 1999), 340 pp.

Pulse is one of those concepts in human physiology that appears untheorized and inescapable, a fact of nature. Yet Kuriyama traces the provenance of the pulse in ancient Greek medicine from pathological spasm to rhythm of life, akin to music. In ancient China, by contrast, doctors measured the palpitations of quiemo, a kind of vital flow to which a complex of descriptive terms including slippery and deep—but not rhythmic—could be applied. Rather than just better or worse science, Kuriyama sees in these distinctions a clue to the changeable aesthetics and lived perceptions of bodies that help to shape our art, philosophy, and healing. It is no accident that only Greek art became fascinated by musculature. "Embodiment studies" have become a cottage industry in recent years, but this work is refreshing and foundational. Greece and China are two societies that have rarely been compared but whose combined medical legacies touch nearly all of the world's people today. Kuriyama's contribution is a wide-ranging, learned, and deeply evocative account of what these forms of medicine share and where they differ, and of what those similarities and differences say about the societies that conceived the forms. The expressiveness of the body means that "knowing the body" is never simply once and for all.