Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge (Comparative Studies of Health Systems & Medical Care, Band 32) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520073177 ISBN 13: 9780520073173

Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR, 1992

Inhaltsangabe

Like its classic predecessor, Asian Medical Systems, Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge significantly expands the study of Asian medicine. These essays ask how patients and practitioners know what they know—what evidence of disease or health they consider convincing and what cultural traditions and symbols guide their thinking. Whether discussing Japanese anatomy texts, Islamic humoralism, Ayurvedic clinical practice, or a variety of other subjects, the authors offer an exciting range of information and suggest new theoretical avenues for medical anthropology.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charles Leslie is Professor of Anthropology and the Humanities at the Center for Science and Culture, University of Delaware. Allan Young is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Humanities and Social Studies in Medicine, McGill University.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge

By Charles Leslie and Allan Young, editors

University of California Press

Copyright © 1992 Charles Leslie and Allan Young, editors
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520073177
One
Between Mind and Eye: Japanese Anatomy in the Eighteenth Century
Shigehisa Kuriyama

It has long been a commonplace of Japanese historiography that the publication of Sugita Gempaku's (1733-1817) Kaitai Shinsho (1774) was a major turning point in Japanese cultural history. As one of the earliest translations of a Western anatomical text, Kaitai Shinsho represented the beginning of two epoch-making developments. First, and most directly, Gempaku's work set in motion the modern transformation of Japanese medicine, revealing not only many anatomical structures hitherto unknown in traditional medicine, but also and more fundamentally introducing the very notion of an anatomical approach to the body—the idea of visual inspection in dissection as the primary and most essential way of understanding the nature of the human body. Second, and more generally, Kaitai Shinsho inspired the rise of Dutch studies (Rangaku ) in Japan, thus giving birth to one of the most decisive influences shaping modern Japanese history, namely, the study of Western languages and science.1

Not surprisingly, Kaitai Shinsho has been the subject of frequent and meticulous study. The tale of how Sugita Gempaku, a physician, with no training in foreign languages, no foreign teachers, no dictionary, and no precedents to rely on, managed through heroic struggles to produce a remarkably sound translation of a Dutch medical text is a story that has fascinated generations. The lives of Sugita Gempaku and his collaborators, the challenges they encountered in this pioneering effort of translation, and the role of Kattai Shinsho in the development of Western studies in Japan have all been repeatedly chronicled in painstaking detail.2

This paper will suggest some new perspectives on this old and familiar material and will raise some questions that have previously not been asked. More specifically, Kaitai Shinsho will be reconsidered in the context of the history of visual perception. My contention is that questions about the rela-

tionship between eye and mind and between looking and seeing constitute the conceptual challenge of Kaitai Shinsho , and that without addressing the relationships framed by these questions we cannot hope to apprehend the deeper implications of the cultural transformation that was taking place in late eighteenth-century Japan.

1

An expression that figures prominently in the writings of Sugita Gempaku, and which defines the leitmotif of his thought, is memboku o aratameru , "changing one's outlook." In its general intent, the meaning of the phrase is clear. It presupposes Gempaku's sense of the profound divide separating the new world, which he is initiating, from the past world of his predecessors; and it expresses his call for a fundamental rethinking of the nature and method of medical knowledge, a radical transformation of habits of mind. In his introduction to Kaitai Shinsho Gempaku urges "all those who read this book to change their outlook."3 He promises a lucidity about the body totally unknown in the past, a new realm of clear and certain perceptions. But, he stipulates, "without a change in outlook, it is impossible to enter this realm.4 In fact, as Gempaku modestly concludes, it was precisely because he himself was able to change his outlook that, despite his natural ineptitude, he was able to achieve insights he could be proud of.5

As Gempaku conceived it, the idea of "changing one's outlook," of membo-ku o aratameru , represented both a prerequisite for, and a consequence of, the transition from Oriental medicine to Dutch medicine, and summarized his conviction that the past and future constituted two entirely different worlds. But this idea naturally gives rise to a number of questions. First, in what ways were the worlds different? That is, what was the precise nature of this "changed outlook"? And how did Gempaku envisage the new realm of medical understanding and experience? Any serious attempt to understand Gempaku and Kaitai Shinsho must address these issues.

To begin, the word "outlook" may be somewhat ambiguous. Generally, "outlook" refers to a conceptual orientation, a set of attitudes. That is, the visual metaphor implicit in "out-look" is usually construed as just that, a metaphor. This common metaphorical interpretation of outlook as conceptual perspective does not, however, capture the full or even primary thrust of Gempaku's call for reform. Rather, "changing one's outlook" must be interpreted literally as well as metaphorically; Gempaku's phrase is as much an expression of a new way of seeing as a call for a new way of thinking. The transformation represented by Kaitai Shinsho was first and foremost perceptual; memboku o aratameru corresponded to a novel mode of visual experience.

Traditionally, the interpretation of Gempaku's changed outlook has focused on the new primacy of anatomy, and this interpretation is certainly

correct—as far as it goes. In one of his late writings, Gempaku first reiterates how he realized the necessity of rejecting long-standing misconceptions and adopting a totally new outlook in medicine. He then goes on to explain: "After that, I understood that true medicine was to be found in the far West, in Holland. The foundation of medicine consists in the detailed investigation of the human body's natural structures, of the appearance of its interior and exterior; and it is when this investigation is accepted as the heart of medicine that medical science in our country will be securely founded."6 What made Dutch medicine true medicine, in other words, and what set it irrevocably apart from the traditional medicine of China and Japan, was its stress on the observations of dissection. The essence of changing one's outlook was learning to conceive of the body anatomically.

This much is straightforward. What is less apparent, however, is exactly what it could mean to conceive of the body anatomically. Here we encounter a critical theoretical lacuna in .the historiography of Japanese medicine. If scholars have unanimously recognized the centrality of the dissector's vision in Gempaku's call for medical reform, none to my knowledge has thought to inquire about what kind of looking this vision involves. Yet it is precisely this question of the particular mode of seeing that we must be most concerned with. To grasp the meaning of Gempaku's call for a changed outlook, common schematic notions of anatomy—of anatomy as simply cutting open the body and peering inside—are inadequate. We need to inquire further and pursue the specific character of anatomical observation.

In his introduction to Kaitai Shinsho , Gempaku stresses that the study of anatomy is in itself neither an unprecedented endeavor nor one unique to the West. Physicians throughout Chinese history had often discussed the internal organs and the skeleton, and some had even pursued dissections. But, he laments,

because their minds were hardened by chronic misconceptions (kyûsen ni kosuru ), even in the case of these physicians, even though they looked at the difference between accepted beliefs and the actual structure of the organs and the skeleton, they wavered haplessly in suspicions and doubts. It is just like the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1992
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520073177
• ISBN 13: 9780520073173
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 296
• Herausgeber: Leslie Charles, Young Allan
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar