Measure Your Meridians: Translation, Genre, and Global East Asian Anatomy

This talk is based on ongoing research that reframes generic anatomical images of jingluo 經絡, or meridians, by considering illustrations of invisible structures as maps. I focus on a long global history of medicine through hand-drawn body maps and spans across the tenth to the twentieth centuries to re-think cultures of objectivity beyond normative geographies of science and medicine. In this talk, I focus on the graphic form of a tu 圖 as a historical category of technical images to understand how images depicted lines that guided diagnostic and therapeutic practice. Specifically, this talk takes on a close reading of a topographical image from the 1264 text Theories of Materia Medica Developed from Grand Methods by Zhong Jing and Derived from Yi Yin (伊尹汤液仲景广为大法) attributed to the self-taught-scholar-physician Wang Haogu 王好古 (1200-1264?). Scholars often debated whether to discursively interpret these lines as meridians, channels, or tracts; practitioners often debated whether these lines merely visualized nerves to articulate needling and heating practices. However, these debates each took the process of representing experience and imagination in medical practice for granted. To reframe these debates, this talk considers body maps as an alternative history of representation, arguing that hand-drawn maps served as a kind of sensory technology. They traced sensations that remained unseen until inscribed on paper. A close study of body maps allows us to understand this range of medical practices and theories that remain multiple and contingent. They raise questions of hybridity, translocality, and ontology, which appeared as stable forms of representation but marked shifting conceptions about the body.