Legions of pigs in the early medieval West

Abstract

through the vanishingly small spaces between things and thoughts, the spaces where knowledge is made. After a brief introduction, the text opens up the TCM clinic to describe the contours of Chinese medical epistemologies: the conceptualization of the human body in its constituent parts and totality, various, competing understandings of disease, and the duties of the practitioner to discern and treat suffering. Working within a medical knowledge system that was not traditionally bound to the collection of “objective” evidence, practitioners of TCM draw on their capacities for pattern recognition and their understanding of the body as a network of interacting things: “A human body, envisioned as interpenetrating networks that channeled powers throughout a decentered system might be read as natural proof that rule of any kind, at any scale, could not be totalitarian, nor could it extend its reach only over discretely bounded territories” (43). In the exam room, in the clinical encounter, and in the medical imagination, Professor Farquhar finds far more than things and thought. Here is the very universe of plural and relational truths that William James imagined.