On Hua Tuo's Position in the History of Chinese Medicine

2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (02) ◽  
pp. 313-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fan Ka Wai

Famed for his surgical expertise, Hua Tuo of the Eastern Han dynasty also excelled in a range of other medical treatments. It is rarely noted that Hua treated patients with a combination of drugs and acupuncture therapy and acquired an expert knowledge of pharmaceutics. The purpose of this article is to explore the rarely studied achievements of Hua Tuo in pharmaceutics, and further discuss the status of Hua in the history of Chinese medicine. The article points out that Hua Tuo inherited the medical achievements of past generations and strongly influenced the development of medicine during the Wei Jin and Southern and Northern Dynasties.

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (8) ◽  
pp. 145
Author(s):  
Xiang Yang Bian ◽  
Aijuan Cao

Most of the existing studies on Gui-Yi, which is a kind of ancient women’s dress of China, are barely about the interpretation of Xian (ie. a long ribbon made of silk) and Shao (ie. a hanging fabric of cloth, shaped like a swallow tail, tied to the waist) of Gui-Yi, on whose origin, development and evolution of the shape and structure there are few discussions. Based upon summarizing the literature, this paper points out that Gui-Yi in Han Dynasty was originated from a relic of San-di (ie. three kinds of ceremonial dress worn by queens in The Rites of Zhou Dynasty-a classical book in ancient China on the bureaucratic establishment system of Zhou Dynasty and the system of states in Warring States Period). In the paper, Gui-Yi is divided into two kinds according to images in archaeological studies, namely, the ‘Gui-Yi in one-piece system’ (‘one-piece system’ is Chinese robe) and ‘Gui-Yi in separate system’ (‘separate system’ is a kind of suit that consists of blouses and skirts). The former was popular in Han Dynasty, and the latter was popular in Wei &Jin Southern and Northern Dynasties. The change of the shape and structure of Gui-Yi conforms to the historical trend that the ‘Gui-Yi in one-piece system’ entered a recession in the late Eastern Han Dynasty and the ‘Gui-Yi in separate system’ became a popular mainstream in Wei &Jin Southern and Northern Dynasties. In addition, the paper points out female images wearing Gui-Yi in Gu Kaizhi's paintings influenced the expression of Gui-Yi image of Wei & Jin Southern and Northern Dynasties, and Gui-Yi were gradually brought into immortal statues during painters’ artistic processing of that time.


Radiocarbon ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 1215-1226 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bing Xu ◽  
Zhaoyan Gu ◽  
Xiaoguang Qin ◽  
Yong Wu ◽  
Guijin Mu ◽  
...  

AbstractThe discovery of the ancient city of Loulan in Xinjiang, China, at the beginning of the 20th century was of great significance for understanding the evolution of culture and civilization in Inner Asia. However, due to the lack of systematic chronological studies, the history of this ancient city remains unclear, particularly the date of its construction and abandonment. Here, we present the results of the first systematic radiocarbon (14C) dating carried out on artifacts from ancient Loulan. Our results show that human activity began as early as 350 cal BC, flourished during the interval from the 1st to 4th centuries AD, and completely disappeared around 600 AD. Most of the buildings in the city were constructed during the Eastern Han Dynasty rather than in Wei/Jin Dynasty, as previously indicated by excavated documents and letters (Hedin 1898; Xiao 2006). The development and flourishing of Loulan coincided with the interval of high ice accumulation and meltwater supply from surrounding mountains. The city began to decline and was finally abandoned following an abrupt decrease in ice accumulation and meltwater supply (Yao et al. 1996; Lauterbach et al. 2014), suggesting that natural climate change was the major factor responsible for the abandonment of Loulan.


2014 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erik Linstrum

AbstractBoth critics and defenders of James Strachey's translations of Sigmund Freud have tended to judge their worth by the standard of “accuracy”—in other words, their faithfulness to Freud's theories. This article takes a different approach, tracing Strachey's choices as a translator to his own experiences in Edwardian, wartime, and interwar Britain. Convinced that the ruling elite and the mass public alike were captive to dangerously irrational forces, Strachey saw the science of the unconscious as a vehicle for political and social criticism. As an attempt to mobilize expert knowledge against the status quo, Strachey's translation represents a divergence from two influential paradigms for interpreting the history of psychoanalysis: Carl Schorske's account of the Freudian “retreat from politics” and Michel Foucault's portrait of the “superstructural” state as an extension and ally of the human sciences. Strachey's translation also demonstrates that the political and social ambitions of British psychoanalysis were powerfully formed by the era of the First World War, and not only the Second, which historians have often identified as the crucial moment.


This chapter studies the development and basic ideas of Chinese aesthetics by reviewing the history of aesthetic perspective from the Han Dynasty; the Wei, Jin, and Southern and Northern Dynasties; the Tang Dynasty; the Five Dynasties; the Song and Yuan Dynasties; and the Ming and Qing Dynasties. The ancient Chinese artists pursued the artistic conception of beauty, namely, the integration of mind and objects, sentiments, and scenes, and the fusion of subjective emotions and objective landscape. Nevertheless, this conception overlooks the function of practice, the intermediary between mind and objects. Actually, there are three fundamental elements: emotion (first feeling) of aesthetic subjects; artistic conception sensed through the painting brush in practice (perception); poetry, books, songs, and paintings as artistic finished products (containing essence and sentiments). It is the combination, conformity, and harmonious co-existence of these three essentials (namely subject–practice–object) that constitute the art system aesthetics or design aesthetics.


1997 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 397-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN C. YALDWYN ◽  
GARRY J. TEE ◽  
ALAN P. MASON

A worn Iguanodon tooth from Cuckfield, Sussex, illustrated by Mantell in 1827, 1839, 1848 and 1851, was labelled by Mantell as the first tooth sent to Baron Cuvier in 1823 and acknowledged as such by Sir Charles Lyell. The labelled tooth was taken to New Zealand by Gideon's son Walter in 1859. It was deposited in a forerunner of the Museum of New Zealand, Wellington in 1865 and is still in the Museum, mounted on a card bearing annotations by both Gideon Mantell and Lyell. The history of the Gideon and Walter Mantell collection in the Museum of New Zealand is outlined, and the Iguanodon tooth and its labels are described and illustrated. This is the very tooth which Baron Cuvier first identified as a rhinoceros incisor on the evening of 28 June 1823.


Author(s):  
Chris Himsworth

The first critical study of the 1985 international treaty that guarantees the status of local self-government (local autonomy). Chris Himsworth analyses the text of the 1985 European Charter of Local Self-Government and its Additional Protocol; traces the Charter’s historical emergence; and explains how it has been applied and interpreted, especially in a process of monitoring/treaty enforcement by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities but also in domestic courts, throughout Europe. Locating the Charter’s own history within the broader recent history of the Council of Europe and the European Union, the book closes with an assessment of the Charter’s future prospects.


Author(s):  
Didier Debaise

Which kind of relation exists between a stone, a cloud, a dog, and a human? Is nature made of distinct domains and layers or does it form a vast unity from which all beings emerge? Refusing at once a reductionist, physicalist approach as well as a vitalistic one, Whitehead affirms that « everything is a society » This chapter consequently questions the status of different domains which together compose nature by employing the concept of society. The first part traces the history of this notion notably with reference to the two thinkers fundamental to Whitehead: Leibniz and Locke; the second part defines the temporal and spatial relations of societies; and the third explores the differences between physical, biological, and psychical forms of existence as well as their respective ways of relating to environments. The chapter thus tackles the status of nature and its domains.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 21-51
Author(s):  
Debashree Mukherjee

In 1939, at the height of her stardom, the actress Shanta Apte went on a spectacular hunger strike in protest against her employers at Prabhat Studios in Poona, India. The following year, Apte wrote a harsh polemic against the extractive nature of the film industry. In Jaau Mi Cinemaat? (Should I Join the Movies?, 1940), she highlighted the durational depletion of the human body that is specific to acting work. This article interrogates these two unprecedented cultural events—a strike and a book—opening them up toward a history of embodiment as production experience. It embeds Apte's emphasis on exhaustion within contemporaneous debates on female stardom, industrial fatigue, and the status of cinema as work. Reading Apte's remarkable activism as theory from the South helps us rethink the meanings of embodiment, labor, materiality, inequality, resistance, and human-object relations in cinema.


Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.


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