Book Reviews

Many comparisons of Greek and Chinese medicine seek underlying similarities, a reassurance that rationality will prevail, an assertion that difference might be complementary. Shigehisa Kuriyama’s project, however, moves from common ground to divergence. It would be as fitting to say that his book, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine, is about perception and truth as to say it is about ancient medicine, for the divergences he traces stem from fundamental issues of knowing and experiencing. The book unfolds as a triptych, with its chapters organized into three thematic parts: styles of touching, styles of seeing, and styles of being. The sections ostensibly pair a chapter on the Greek tradition with a chapter on the Chinese, but there is a constant folding and mixing, for the individual chapters each contribute a new perspective on the common question of personhood and perception. To begin, Kuriyama considers the pulse.What seems to be a shared practice in Greek and Chinese medicine is actually not the same at all. Greek and Chinese practitioners who silently grasped patients by the wrist and then made diagnoses were not simply figuring the same objective information into different cultural equations. They were, quite literally, feeling different things for different purposes. “Theoretical preconceptions at once shaped and were shaped by the contours of haptic sensation” (p. ). Kuriyama then explores the way the Chinese medical understanding of “pulse” arose, concluding that “the history of conceptions of the body must be understood in conjunction with a history of conceptions of communication” (p. ). How medical practitioners touched the body was intimately related to their search for the language of life and their understanding of the expressiveness of the body. Styles of seeing were similarly affected. Kuriyama constructs anatomy as a training of medical vision that emerged through the broader association of musculature with voluntary action and agency in Greek culture. In China, however, vision was focused on the perception of se, or color. The cultural metaphor of growing plants and blooming flowers taught Chinese