This roundtable highlights the cross-cultural exchange of sensorial knowledge and practice between different healing cultures within Asia and between Asia and the West. Each participant’s case study reveals a dynamic process of translocal interplay in forming emergent understandings about the senses in relation to the body, conditioned by commercial interests, religious aspirations, and colonial influences. Yan Liu examines how transregional exchange of aromatics from West, South, and Southeast Asia—like saffron, camphor, and frankincense—shaped the production of olfactory knowledge and its relation to medical practice among Chinese physicians in the medieval period. Claire Cooper investigates how “mummy medicine,” as knowledge and commodity, was translated from early modern Dutch pharmacopeia into Japanese medical treatises, and the multisensorial ethical concerns that emerged in Japan from the idea of consuming the dead. Genie Yoo explores the role of the body and the senses in Islamicate understandings of spirit possession and exorcism in early modern and modern Indonesia, with an emphasis on the medical and magical potency of Quranic verses in their recited, written, and edible forms. Finally, Ling Ma illuminates how Euro-American missionary surgeons based in China at the turn of the twentieth century relied on touch to establish trademark “modern” methods in diagnosing and treating the birthing body of Chinese women. Paying attention to both local and transregional dynamics influenced by the circulation of commodities, ideas, and people, this second roundtable, together with a related one submitted separately, invites participants and attendees to rethink the role of the senses in medicine and society across regions and time periods, while bringing a diversity of Asian perspectives into the conversation.
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
