Korean Anatomical Charts in the Context of the East Asian Medical Tradition

2009 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 186-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuseok Kim ◽  
Shin Dongwon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
East Asian ◽  
The Body ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Traditional Korean Medicine ◽  
Medical Tradition ◽  
Anatomical Images ◽  
History Of ◽  
Medical Book ◽  
Pictorial Representations

Abstract This paper examines the characteristics of the illustrations in Heo Jun’s Dong’ui’bo’gam (Treasured Collections of an Eastern Physician), which are the sole distinctively Korean pictorial representations in the history of Korean medical texts. Those anatomical images differ from earlier East Asian anatomical charts in three important ways. First, they embody the view that Daoist practices for preserving health and vitality (yangsheng) are closer to the essence of life than is medicine. Second, unlike existing medical texts, which mainly focused on the organs inside the body and the channels on the surface of the body, they emphasise building up systematic outer ‘bodily form’. Third, they reflect Heo Jun’s regard for the anatomical content of the earlier Inner Canon and the Classic of Difficulties rather than the contributions of positivistic anatomy from and after the Song and Yuan Dynasties, and the diagrams of the five zang- organs are devised in accord with such a view. In my view, these three points in Treasured Collections of an Eastern Physician (hereafter Treasured Collection), the most influential medical book since its publication, provides clues to understanding the very conservative character of traditional Korean medicine in the seventeenth century and thereafter.

The Debate about methodus medendi during the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century in England

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 339-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Crignon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Comparative Anatomy ◽  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ancient Medicine ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Ancient Philosopher ◽  
Active Investigation

Following a recent trend in the field of the history of philosophy and medicine, this paper stresses the necessity of recognizing empiricism’s patent indebtedness to the sciences of the body. While the tribute paid to the Hippocratic method of observation in the work of Thomas Sydenham is well known, it seems necessary to take into account a trend more critical of ancient medicine developed by followers of chemical medicine who considered the doctrine of elements and humours to be a typical example of the idols that hinder the improvement of medical knowledge and defend the necessity of experimentation (comparative anatomy, dissection, autopsy, chemical analysis of bodies). In light of the fact that modern discoveries (blood circulation, the lymphatic system, theory of fevers) resulted in a “new frame of human nature,” they developed a critical reading of ancient empiricism. As a consequence, we can distinguish between two distinct anti-speculative traditions in the genesis of philosophical empiricism. The first (which includes Bacon, Boyle and Willis) recommends an active investigation into nature and refers to the figure of Democritus, the ancient philosopher who devoted himself to the dissection of beasts. Defenders of this first tradition refuse point-blank to be called ‘empiricists’, a label which had a very negative meaning during the seventeenth century, when it was used to dismiss charlatans and quacks. The other tradition (including Sydenham and Locke), stressing as it does the role of description and observation, is more sceptical of the ability of dissection or anatomy to give us access to causes of diseases. This later tradition comes closer to the definition of ancient empiricism and to the figure of Hippocrates.


scholarly journals O prvoj monografskoj obradi škrinje Svetog Šimuna u Zadru

Ars Adriatica ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 187
Author(s):  
Marijana Kovačević
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Date ◽  
The Third ◽  
Monographic Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
Very High ◽  
Do So

This paper paraphrases the first monographic study of the silver casket which was commissioned in the last quarter of the fourteenth century as a reliquary for the body of St Simeon in Zadar. The author of the monograph ‘The Silberschrein des S. Simeone in Zara’ is Alfréd Gotthold Meyer, an art historian from Berlin. The manuscript was written in German, translated into Hungarian and published in Budapest in 1894. Both the manuscript and the book are available only in a few copies in Croatia and this was one of the incentives for writing this article, apart from the need to introduce and evaluate one of the key works ever written on this important subject, and to do so in a more detailed manner than it had been done before. Meyer divided the material in five chapters. In the first chapter he deals with the traditions about the relic. The second chapter is a summary of the documents concerning the history of the silver casket. In the third chapter Meyer describes the reliefs on the casket and discusses their iconography, while in the fourth chapter he analyses them stylistically and attempts to reconstruct the original arrangement of particular reliefs. The final, fifth chapter is the most important part of this work, because it emphasizes comparisons between the Zadar casket and similar works in Italy and Dalmatia. The book has all the qualities of a scholarly text which is rather surprising for such an early date. Meyer pointed out a number of key notions about the supposedly different authors of particular reliefs, for example several master pieces of Italian painting and sculpture which may have inspired these authors, and he also noted the important seventeenth-century restoration on the casket. A. G. Meyer set very high scholarly standards with his work, which were rarely achieved in many subsequent publications on the casket, especially during the first half of the twentieth century.

Medicine

2009 ◽  
pp. 551-568
Author(s):  
Brooke Holmes
Keyword(s):  
Medical History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Parts ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Internal Organs ◽  
History Of

This article attempts to characterize a secular tradition of medicine, and focuses on approaches to the body and theories of causation. It seems that, just like the street philosophers, magicians were more individualistic and charismatic than the writers of systematic treatises, and yet they too sometimes relied on texts. It is important to remain open to possible connections between magic and medicine. For example, in the course of medical history, dissection and investigation of the interior of the body gradually became more prominent; similarly, ancient curses, spells, and binds became increasingly specific about the body parts and internal organs they targeted. The wider context of society is relevant here: magical and medical texts are affected by the history of torture, and of vivisection.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Bray
Keyword(s):  
Military Personnel ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The Body ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
East Asian Region ◽  
Medical Associations ◽  
History Of ◽  
Gender And Health ◽  
And Gender

This volume breaks new ground in the history of East Asian biopolitics, offering the first broad-based exploration of gender and health in the region during the long twentieth century. The core theme is the complex meshing of biology, body, and citizen that underpins projects of biological nation building and molds the forms of modern subjectivity. The nine case studies presented here, spanning Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from the 1870s to the present, demonstrate just how tightly concerns with gender and health have been woven into the enterprise of modernization and nation building throughout the period. Colonial powers and medical associations, government bureaucrats, military personnel, and pharmaceutical companies as well as scientists, educators, and medical practitioners contributed to the legitimation and popularization of evolving scientific discourses and interpretations of the gendered body, sex, and reproductive health. As novel visions of the body and its possibilities took shape, new expressions of individuality, sociality, transgression or resistance, new desires, and fears emerged. Across the region and over the decades, norms and ideals, techniques, terminology, and forms of scientific or cultural authority circulated and converged, faded and resurfaced. In mapping such flows, influences, and reactions, the volume highlights the prominent role that the biopolitics of health and gender has played in knitting and shaping the East Asian region as we know it today....

English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurence Lux-Sterritt
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Spiritual Guidance ◽  
Point Of Entry ◽  
Catholic Women ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Ideal

Between 1598 and 1800, an estimated 3, 271 Catholic women left England to enter convents on the Continent. This study focuses more particularly upon those who became Benedictines in the seventeenth century, choosing exile in order to pursue their vocation for an enclosed life. Through the study of a wide variety of original manuscripts, including chronicles, death notices, clerical instructions, texts of spiritual guidance, but also the nuns’ own collections of notes, this book highlights the tensions between the contemplative ideal and the nuns’ personal experiences. Its first four chapters adopt a traditional historical approach to illustrate the tensions between theory and practice in the ideal of being dead to the world. They offer a prosopographical study of Benedictine convents in exile, and show how those houses were both cut-off and enclosed yet very much in touch with the religious and political developments at home. The next fur chapters propose a different point of entry into the history of nuns, with a study of emotions and the senses in the cloister, delving into the textual analysis of the nuns’ personal and communal documents to explore aspect of a lived spirituality, when the body, which so often hindered the spirit, at times enabled spiritual experience.

Chinese, Tartars and “Thea” or a Tale of Two Companies: The English East India Company and Taiwan in the Late Seventeenth Century

1993 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-426
Author(s):  
Derek Massarella
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
East Asian ◽  
Unintended Consequence ◽  
East India Company ◽  
History Of ◽  
English East India Company ◽  
Direct Trade

A number of years ago, Dr D. K. Bassett pointed out that the English East India Company's objective in re-entering East Asian waters during the second half of the seventeenth century was the re-establishment of a direct trade with Japan from which the company had withdrawn in 1623. It was a futile pursuit. But, far from being an inconsequential historical footnote, the unintended consequence of this policy was the beginning of a direct trade with China, first mooted in the 1610s and which was to prove of greater consequence to the company's fortunes than the chimera of trade with Tokugawa Japan. It is within this context and that of the changing fortunes of the English company and its Dutch rival as well as the broader East Asian situation that the brief, and largely ignored, history of the company's factory on Taiwan is worth examining.

Seventeenth-Century Draining of the Fens and the Impact on Navigation

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL CHISHOLM
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
Special Lecture ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

This lecture presents the text of the speech about seventeenth-century draining of the fens and its impact on navigation delivered by the author at the 2008 British Academy Special Lecture. It traces the history of the body known as the Conservators of the River Cam as a navigation authority in 1702. The lecture discusses the papers published by the Cam Conservancy that portrayed the drainage works as having been seriously prejudicial to navigation.

Penfield’s Homunculus and Other Grotesque Creatures from the Land of If

Nuncius ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 141-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudio Pogliano
Keyword(s):  
Functional Organization ◽  
The Body ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
Montreal Neurological Institute ◽  
Surgical Ablation ◽  
Cortical Areas ◽  
History Of ◽  
Mcgill University ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Different Parts

The neurosurgeon Wilder Graves Penfield (1891-1976) helped to develop a surgical treatment for epilepsy and used his results to investigate the functional organization of the brain. He was instrumental in founding the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University, which he directed from 1934 to 1960. There he studied, with his collaborators, the effects of stimulation and surgical ablation on different parts of the brain in order to localize their somatosensory functions. To visualize the results of this research, Hortense Pauline Cantlie drew images of a homunculus whose proportions reflected the extent of the cortical areas controlling different parts of the body. These images were published by Penfield in 1937; a modified version followed in 1950, opening the way for such developments as the diagrams of mammalian brains drawn by the neurophysiologist Clinton N. Woolsey in 1958. This article will reconstruct the history of Penfield’s map of the human brain, which was utilized in medical texts for many decades, but which eventually would be severely criticized.

"Prodigious Poop": Comic Context and Psychological Subtext in Irving's Knickerbocker History

1995 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 483-512
Author(s):  
Jonathan A. Cook
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Human Development ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Psychological Development ◽  
Human Reproduction ◽  
New Amsterdam ◽  
History Of

This essay attempts to elucidate the structual principles of Irving's "low" humor in the Knickerbocker History of New York by showing that the History is predicated on a schema of human development. In this comprehensive comic allegory the "peopling" of North America suggests the process of human reproduction while the "infant history" of seventeenth-century New York parallels the process of childhood psychological development according to a Freudian psychoanalytic model. As clusters of comic imagery and episode reveal, the reigns of Irving's three Dutch governors-Walter the Doubter, William the Testy, and Peter the Headstrong-embody the oral, anal, and genital (phallic) stages of child development. Similarly, the instinctual orientation of the gubernatorial body is mirrored in the body politic. The reign of Peter Stuyvesant, which occupies the most space in the History, is also notable for a pair of allegorical doublets, Jacobus Von Poffenburgh and Antony Van Corlear, who represent Peter's false and true phallic heroes, respectively. During Peter's reign, an implied contest between these two phallic personages transpires, ending with the English takeover of New Amsterdam.

Introduction: Secularization and the Resurrection of the Flesh

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Experimental Poetry ◽  
Critical Potential ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Secular Modernity ◽  
History Of ◽  
Oppositional Discourse

The introduction traces the intellectual history of resurrection from the Hellenistic era through the Reformation and up to the advent of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. To make the idea of resurrection more compatible with an emerging secular modernity it is gradually modified in the direction of dualism by positing a detachable soul that lives on after death. But the ancient hope for the resurrection of the body and its flesh lives on as an oppositional discourse that challenges key institutions of an emerging secular modernity including the models of selfhood, subjectivity, and agency it assumes and privileges. The critical potential of the residual idea of the resurrection of the body and its flesh is most evident in the most experimental poetry of the century, which I argue anticipates the avant-garde poetry of the early twentieth century theorized by Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger. The formally experimental poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson is a tool for bringing to light a deranging experience of being vibrant matter at the heart of the socialized self.

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