Global Asia Studies Lecture 3
o This week focus to anatomy (views on the structure of the human body),
physiology (views on the functioning of the human body), and diagnosis of disease.
Particular attention to Classical South Asian, Tibetan and Chinese medical views.
o This week’s readings primarily focuses on how the body works and how it is viewed to
work through the perspective of a physician
It will discuss topics mainly on the pulse diagnosis in Greece, China, Tibet and
South Asia
o There are various forms of medicine. Allopathy or bio-medicine is the non-natural,
man-made forms of treatment, usually require testing – results –sales – and the
fusion of chemicals, based on the idea of it should be tested by science before it is
capable of treating patients
o Reading 3.1 – Part 1: The Pulse in Classical Greece and China
Talks about what pulse is and what it represents and speaks of pulse as if it
were a person
Standard two finger pulse measurement on the wrist along the pulsing artery
Haptic – anything to do with experience of touch
Palpation – physical examination by touch
o Early Greek physicians and people believed that:
They give items that come up in their debates; jealousies and suspicions
Composed seven extended treaties on the pulse; physicians declared that
nothing more than the pulse is important;
Pulse was referred to as the language of life
Give terminology to discuss the topics
Pulse is extremely puzzling to them
At one point believed that pulse felt was from inflammation
from wound that gave throbbing pulses
Sphygmoi – or pluse, named throbbing and pulsing in their
concrete multiplicity; refers to a variety of pulses, such as the
large pulse, the small pulse, the quick pulse, and the slow pulse
Palmos – which are the palpitates ~ abnormal movements in the
blood vessels and elsewhere, and the difference between them
was frequently unclear
Scientific method of thinking comes up here
Pulse diagnosis - European doctors felt for the “pulse”
The pulse was “overlooked” by Hippocratic physicians, those keen observers.
But our impulse is to regard this as a perceptual lapse, an odd failure to notice
something already there, waiting to be noticed
When we feel when we place our fingers on the wrist, and palpate the
movements there – we call it the pulsing artery
Anatomy helped to refine the work of the pulse, it framed the very possibility
of imagining the pulse Greek sphygmology was born with the assertion that whatever similarities they
might present to the touch, pulsation, palpitation, tremor, and spasm differ in
the structures that underlie them
The artery was a visible structure, the pulse was set of motions;
motions were inaccessible to sight thus the pulse had to be felt
What our fingers feel, the empiricists contended, is merely the
sensation of being struck. We don’t actually perceive the artery
expanding and contracting. We only infer diastole and systole.
Empirically the pulse is nothing more than a series of beats and pauses
Greek diagnosticians evinced little interest in, or even awareness of, the differing
feel of the pulse in distant parts – since the arteries all spring from the heart,
doctors expected traits like speed, frequency, and rhythm to be the same in them
all
Talks of the Greek dichotomy of structure and function – the split between artery
and pulse
o Early classical Chinese viewed pulse as:
Preferred to feel the pulse before hearing about the illness, up to the patient
to take or discern the advice of the physician
Considered the meaning of what they fingers felt came upon the site at which
pulse was felt
They had the notion of three pulse point per hand: thus 12 possible readings
were able to happen
Chinese doctors recognized four ways to judge person’s conditions – gazing
(wang), listening and smelling (wen), questioning (wen), and touching (qie).
In practice however, their attentions concentrated mainly on qiemo, palpating
the mo.
Up until the 19 century, talk of medicine in China first called to mind this “
skill in pulses”
Qiemo - Chinese doctors felt for the mo – indicated palpation of the various
mo, that is, a procedure for tracking changes in the conduits that so
powerfully affected the body’s pains and powers ~ there are 12 different mo
The finger placed lightly on the right wrist, at the cun position, diagnosed the
large intestines, while the finger next to it discerned the state of the stomach
Pressing harder, these two fingers probed, respectively, the flourishing
or decline of the lungs and spleen.
Under each finger, then, doctors separated a superficial (fu) site, and
felt near the body surgace, from a sunken (chen) site deeper down.
There were six pulses under the index, middle, and ring finders, and
twelve pulses on the two wrists combined
Floating pulse: light beat of the pulse, Sunken pulse: the heavier beat of the
pulse told two different information about a human’s health
The disposition of sites thus roughly mirrored the spatial organization of the
body. The upper position corresponded to the body above the diaphragm, the middle position to between the diaphragm and the navel, and the lower
position to the lower body
A unifying assumption ran through them all – all approaches took for granted
that the meaning of what the fingers felt depended on where they felt it –
different from European place as in Chinese medicine there is the belief in the
significance of place
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