The Expressiveness of the Body + The Way of Water

The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine
By Shigehisa Kuriyama

The Way of Water and Sprouts of Virtue
By Sarah Allan

“The expressiveness of the body” by Shigehisa Kuriyama + “The Way of Water” by Sarah Allan

The Expressiveness of the Body had been on my TBR stack for quite some time, like maybe years and The Way of Water I read during my first year of grad school. It was transformative in my understanding of the complexity of thought that undergirds Chinese medicine and my own inability to fully enter into that thought stream - rooted in utterly different epistemologies as we are. Allan’s book is a great study in how to encounter the limits of one’s understanding and continue learning while simultaneously owning and exploring those inherent limits. I think this is too little discussed in alternative healthcare medical education; that western ways of knowing are a distinct barrier against understanding the medicine we are studying and practicing. I found Allan’s book to be a great resource for humility as a student of medicine, for what is any practitioner of any medicine but a forever student? 

Putting Allan’s perspectives of Chinese thought into conversation with Kuriyama’s juxtaposing of ancient Chinese and Greek ideas about medicine was super fun and beguiling. There’s an interesting dilemma when encountering scholarship of Chinese medicine in English. It is either overly scholarly and absent much clinical perspective, written by linguistic and cultural scholars and not clinicians or it is overly rhapsodic and diluted by vacuous references to very difficult to translate or explain concepts, even ubiquitous ideas like qi or yin-yang theory. Kuriyama is a scholar and not a clinician and so his writing about Chinese medicine lacks clinical bearings. However, the ways in which he enjambs the two medical perspectives is incredibly interesting. It invited me more deeply into one of my favorite living questions; “how does the body experience itself?” It nudged me more  into my ongoing exploration of anatomy study as suffering from the limits of culture and gaze. What is most apparent - our bodies - is still the thing we struggle most to come to terms with. On my current reading stack is Voice of the Fish: a lyric essay by Lars Horn. It is another exploration of the challenges inherent in having a body. 

The conversation that emerged between the two texts led me to finally get a copy of Birth of the Clinic by Foucault - which, at some point, will enter the conversation. 

-Michael McMahon