Happy Lunar New Year from the USC US-China Institute!
The Body Politic and the Body Anatomic in Late Imperial China
The Krieger School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University will host David Luesink as a part of its Spring 2017 Speaker Series.
When:
April 25, 2017 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Where
This is the first chapter of a larger project on the significance of dissection-based anatomy in China. It explores the limited history of dissection in pre-Twentieth century China, as well as the connections between concepts of the human body and those of the body politic. Anatomy promised a radical break from the past for the educational modernizers of early twentieth century China, yet this break was premised on the ancient connection drawn between the organization of the cosmos, the state, and the human body. Confucian China prohibited cutting the human body as unfilial, and yet theorized a sophisticated body politic based on ancient anatomical ideas. So late nineteenth-century reformers argued that Qing China’s problems in governing the realm stemmed from an epistemological failure to grasp the true nature of the human body, and the solutions to these problems could be found in the proper investigation of the body. The body politic and the body anatomic could not be separated in the transition to modernity.
David Luesink is Visiting Assistant Professor of East Asian History and Associate of the Asian Studies Center at the University of Pittsburgh. His manuscript in progress is titled The Body Politic and the Body Anatomic in Modern China and he is principal editor of China and the Globalization of Biomedicine, under consideration by Rochester University Press. His article, “Anatomy and the Reconfiguration of Life and Death in Republican China,” will be published in the Journal of Asian Studies in January 2018. From 2011-2013 he was Luce Postdoctoral Fellow for the project “History of Western Medicine in China,” co-sponsored by the programs of medical humanities at Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis and Peking University and he was lead designer of the digital history site for that project: http://ulib.iupui.edu/wmicproject/
Cost:
Free
Phone Number:
(410) 516-0633
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