Shigehisa Kuriyama, Harvard University
The Travel of Anxieties: Rethinking the impact of Western medicine on Japanese conceptions of the body
Historians of early modern Japan have long cited the appearance of the Kaitai shinsho (1774), a translation of a European anatomical text, as a critical turning point in Japanese studies of Western languages and science. But the importance of this text in the broad history of cultural transfer has, I argue, long distorted interpretations of Japanese medical history. It has greatly exaggerated, on the one hand, the impact of Western anatomy, and has completely hidden, on the other, a far deeper transformation. For Japanese medicine before the end of the nineteenth century, the most significant change inspired by the encounter with Europe lay not, in fact, in altered notions of bodily structure, but rather in new fears of vulnerability.
Professor Kuriyama proposes, then, to sketch a radically different account of how conceptions of the body in Japan were affected by the West. But through this specific case study I hope, too, to suggest how studies of global science may need to look beyond just the circulation of ideas and practices, and consider as well the travel of anxieties.
Shigehisa Kuriyama is Professor and Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Professor in the Department of History of Science at Harvard University. His research explores broad philosophical issues (being and time, representations and reality, knowing and feeling) through the lens of specific topics in comparative medical history (Japan, China, and Europe). His recent work includes studies on the imagination of strings in the metaphysics and experience of presence, the visceral fear of excrement in Western medicine, the transformation of money into a palpable humor in Edo Japan, the nature of hiddenness in traditional Chinese medicine, and the surprising web of connections binding the histories of ginseng, opium, tea, silver, and MSG.
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