Understanding is Within One's Grasp (Liaoran zaiwo 遼 然 在 握): A Cultural History of Bodily Arts of Memory, Prognostication, and Being in Chinese Medicine
Understanding is Within One's Grasp (Liaoran zaiwo 遼 然 在 握): A Cultural History of Bodily Arts of Memory, Prognostication, and Being in Chinese Medicine
Understanding is Within One's Grasp captures three distinct ways Chinese physicians deployed their bodies therapeutically as a medical instrument: via hand mnemonics, dactylomancy (using one’s fingers to practice chronomancy, a form of divination based on temporal parameters), and through bodily forms of self-cultivation. By placing the healer’s body itself at the center of the therapeutic encounter, this book weaves three narrative threads together: 1) bodily arts of memory (hand mnemonics), prognostication (dactylomancy, chronomancy), and being (self-cultivation practices) with 2) specific healing practices such as pulse taking, prescribing herbs, needling, and moxibustion, and 3) the temporal imagination (namely, the various temporal parameters directly related to chronomancy and medical prognostication). I use the phenomenon of hand mnemonics thus as a heuristic device to enter both the minds of healers (and diviners) and the social world in which the knowledge summarized on their hands was considered valuable enough to memorize and used in medical prognosis, diagnosis, and therapy. Fate prediction and medical prognosis are some of the most important arenas of knowledge in which memorization was not only highly valued in Chinese culture but also pragmatic in daily life, especially for health care decisions. I thus weave together the three threads of bodily arts of memory, prognostication, and being in a new cultural history of Chinese medicine that, inspired by Lawrence and Shapin’s Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, for the first time places historical embodiment, and even corporeal epistemology, at the center of the history of Chinese medicine, prognostication, and healing practices.
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