While historians of medicine are keenly aware of the importance of sensorial knowledge and practice in healing, most studies have focused on Western societies and the five conventional senses. By discussing medicine and the senses in Asia, this first roundtable, together with a related one submitted separately, aims to reconceptualize what constitutes the senses by exploring a wide range of sensorial conditions and techniques in various Asian healing cultures, from East, South, and Southeast Asia to the Near East. Furthermore, the discussion seeks to shed light on the connection between the senses and culture, gender, and politics in various Asian contexts.
Lisa Brooks discusses the central role of touch in the ontology, epistemology, diagnostics, and treatments of first-millennium Ayurvedic medicine, through which to reveal constructions of gendered interactions and embodied knowledge in premodern South Asian medical sources. Lan Li discusses the sense of ma in premodern Chinese medical and literary sources, a word that denotes a common plant yet encapsulates a multiplicity of sensations related to plant-human relations, including flavor, touch, and pain. Saghar Bozorgi discusses the role of embodied practices in healing mental illness, through oral history narratives of 1960s and 1970s Iran, demonstrating how the senses of non-human creatures could directly impact a human’s mental well-being. Finally, Nicole Barnes discusses the odor of night soil, or “humanure,” in modern China, illustrating how sensitivity to the stench of humanure and its related health concerns became politically mobilized in the Mao era.
Collectively, this roundtable intends to expand our understanding of the senses by bringing key Asian perspectives into the conversation. We also hope that medicine and the senses can be a useful window through which to acquire deeper insights into a given Asian society.
Chair email:
[email protected]Learning Outcomes- Develop the capacity for critical thinking about the nature, ends and limits of medicine
- Understand the dynamic history of medical ideas and practices, their implications for patients and health care providers, and the need for lifelong learning
- Recognize the dynamic interrelationship between medicine and society through history
