This beautifully produced book is an enhanced edited volume based on a conference held in Beijing in 2005 on visual cultures of medicine, supported by the Wellcome Trust. A shorter but well received Chinese volume was published in 2007. The preparation of this substantially augmented English edition of more than 500 pages structured around thirty-seven chapters, including two introductions, took more than ten years. The book is dedicated to the veteran historian of Chinese medicine Prof. Ma Jixing (1925–) of the Academy of Chinese Medicine, Beijing, an iconic figure and teacher of many influential scholars in the field.
The book is a collaboration of more than thirty Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Western practitioners and scholars of ‘Chinese’ medicine very broadly defined. It also covers a long span of history of over 2000 years, demonstrating the trans-temporal meanings of medical images. The authors ‘interrogated the liminal and transcendental qualities of Chinese medical images as they are translated for new audiences’ (p.3). Preceded by two long introductions by the organisers of the 2005 conference, Vivienne Lo and Wang Shumin (former student of Ma Jixing) with Gabriel Fuentes, the thirty-five chapters are organised into six parts: 1. Mapping the Body: space , time and gender; 2. Effective Representation; 3. Imagining Medical Practice; 4. Imagining Travelling Medicine; 5. Esoteric Contexts and Knowledge Transmission; 6. Imagining Modern Medicine. The structure seems to take into consideration the different approaches to the study of medical images, very long temporal span of the medical images discussed, inter-fertilisation of different medical and religious traditions in East Asia, and also the central position of the body map as medical image privileged by Vivienne Lo, the editor.
The book begins with chapters on body maps depicting an imagined internal space and structure where qi circulates. Its movements could become observable externally as bodily postures often reveal class, age and gender specificity. This part prepares the reader for a deeper understanding of the intriguing relations between the observable external signs (such as the colour and appearance of the tongue, the tangible pulse, meridian points, etc.) and the body interior imagined as ‘a system of correspondences that permeated the natural and spiritual worlds’ (p. 53). This point underlies many chapters in the book and is well represented by various images. Contributors to this volume can roughly be divided into two main groups: practitioners and historians/anthropologists of medicine, with a few wearing both hats. In parts 2 and 3, practitioners clearly tend to emphasise the functions of images as effective teaching and learning aids, or as representations of practice or knowledge standardised, such as those on materia medica. Historians/anthropologists, on the other hand, often pay closer attention to the historical and social contexts of image production in which the imperial state, religious and various social groups played crucial roles.
Despite its title, Chinese and Daoist medicine is not the only tradition discussed in this book, and much emphasis is on the intense inter-fertilisation of various medical and religious traditions in East Asia: Japanese, Korean, Persian, Buddhist, Tibetan, Mongolian and even Western medicines are given weight in parts 4 and 5. The rich Dunhuang medical manuscripts and murals of the early periods, and the plentifully illustrated printed Korean Japanese and European medical texts in the later periods offer valuable sources for comparative studies, not only for human medicine, but also for veterinary medicine. The reader, however, may question the relative lack of discussion on Vietnamese and Indian medicines, and the fleeting inclusion of Islamic medical impact. The book ends with entertaining discussions on new media and images as modern marketing and didactic tools in part 6.
The great diversity of the chapters in this book is wonderfully substantiated by the wide range and excellent quality of the accompanying images: paintings, murals, archaeological findings, drawings, charts, illustrations in manuscripts and in printed matters, on the body and body parts, materia medica, therapeutic practices, daily health care, spiritual practices, health propaganda and so on, some of which have rarely been published, at least in medical texts. These amazing images are not only aesthetically astounding, but also intellectually stimulating, raising key questions on the changing relations between images and texts for diverse epistemic genres in different historical periods. They reveal much more effectively than the texts the complexity of ‘Chinese medicine’ as a body of knowledge, and challenge us to rethink the cultural, regional, religious boundaries often drawn around this fluid body of knowledge that we too often take for granted.
