Pulse Diagnostics in Chinese Medicine
Touch, tactile perception, and tactility are aspects of Chinese medicine that are fundamental for understanding basic concepts of Chinese medicine like qi (usually translated as influence or energy) and zang (often translated as inner organs, depots, or viscera), and others. The language of emotion is often a tactile one, and this may explain why a tactually known body attends to feelings and emotions.
The first extant text that deals extensively with an already fairly elaborate art of Chinese pulse diagnostics consists of twenty-five medical case histories, recorded by a doctor called Chunyu Yi (born 215 BC), and transmitted to us in the 105th chapter of the Records of the Historian by Sima Qian (?145 –86 BC). Two projects revolved around this text. One is the translation of the entire chapter in collaboration with the Department of East Asian Languages and Literature, University of Wisconsin (forthcoming). The other is the publication of a monograph that focuses on what had already then been highly complex concepts of disease and their diagnosis through tactile perception, a diagnostic process that is not primarily dependent on establishing what the cause of a disorder is (Hsu 2010).
Another series of texts on pulse diagnostics dates to between the 7th – 11th century AD. The series is part of a corpus of medical manuscripts found in a Buddhist cave at Dunhuang. The texts have many parallels in the received literature, which may in fact have been written in earlier periods, but which has since been edited and revised and is difficult to date; any text, also a manuscript text, is of course multi-layered, and contains information dating to various time periods. All texts on pulse diagnostics in the following Dunhuang manuscripts have been summarised and indexed: P2115, P3287, P3477, P3481, P3655, S79, S181, S202, S5614, S6245, S8289, S9431, S9443. A synopsis of them is provided in an introductory essay, which also outlines a modular reading of these texts. Their study contributes to the project “Medicine, religion et société dans la Chine mediévale: Etude de manuscrits chinois de Dunhuang et de Turfan” (Despeux 2010).
Following these textual studies, Professor Elisabeth Hsu undertook ethnographic fieldwork on the tactile qualities of different pulse patterns, and how one learns to identify and talk about them during the medical encounter, while working with a ninth generation Chinese medical doctor in Huizhou, Anhui province, PRC, in autumn 2009. Notes and video clips await analysis.