An Investigation of Mutual Interactions between the Practice of Chinese Medicine and Biomedicine

Massachusetts Institute Of Technology, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

General Audience Summary This dissertation research project traces the production of two of the first English-language acupuncture atlases in the 20th century. These atlases highlight the work of standardizing Traditional Chinese Medicine to mirror western medicine, and thus legitimate its practice, while simultaneously mapping invisible meridians that fall outside the regular purview of evidence-based Western medicine. In addition to engaging in archival research, the project will also involve conducting a limited number of interviews with individuals affiliated with the production and circulation of acupuncture atlases in the United Kingdom, the United States, and China. Besides publishing the results of this research in scholarly journals, the visual and textual components of this project will serve as material in documentary filmmaking to reach beyond the confines of academia and engage with broader concerns in health care. The author has extensive experience in digital media that will facilitate using the results of this research to make short films that will contribute a global, non-western, human-centered perspective of medicine to a broader audience. Technical Summary The goal of this project is to demonstrate how two seemingly disparate medical practices, Chinese medicine and biomedicine, became entangled. The project will provide a comparative analysis of the production of two texts, Celestial Lancets (1980), and Acupuncture (1981). The body maps collected and reproduced in these two case studies will serve as sites for examining medical theory and medical practice. Among the research questions to be addressed are the following. How were medical practices articulated as science? What did illustrations of the body define and obscure? The project adopts a transnational perspective and a multidisciplinary approach. It builds on and departs from studies in the history of the body, visualization and representation in science, and post-colonial science and technology. This is not just a project about the making of maps, but about how the private lives of historical actors entangled with standardizing a narrative of the body was situated within a global history of experimentation and practice.