Lecture on Medical Anthropology and the History of Medical Sciences: Bridging Medicine and the Humanities and Social Sciences X

2018/10/29

Overview:

As an attempt to bridge the humanities and social sciences and the medical sciences, we will welcome Professor Shigehisa Kuriyama, who has taught the history of medical sciences at Harvard University for many years. Professor Kuriyama is a world authority on the social scientific study of medicine. In his book "The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine," he depicted the fundamentally different conceptions of the body underlying ancient Greek and ancient Chinese medicine. In "Disease and Medical Sciences in History," he elucidated when the Japanese people began to suffer from stiff shoulders. Furthermore, in his edited volume "The Bodily Sensibility of Modern Japan," he analyzed the discontinuities and continuities in bodily sensation brought about by the modern era through the permeation of "stress" discourse in modern Japan. In "The Birth of Tardiness: The Formation of Time-Consciousness in Modern Japan," he explored the historical origins of Japanese diligence. In recent years, in the age of big data, he has been developing research using innovative methodologies, focusing on how history can be questioned and retold using a databank of images. On this occasion, Professor Kuriyama will give a class at Keio University similar to the one he teaches at Harvard, delivering a lecture on the history of medical sciences while also teaching the secrets of presentation.

Professor Kuriyama's Brief Biography:

Shigehisa Kuriyama received his A.B. degree from Harvard's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations in 1977 and an A.M. degree in 1978. After completing acupuncture studies in Tokyo, he entered Harvard's Department of the History of Science, which awarded him a Ph.D. in 1986. He joined the Harvard faculty as Reischauer Professor in 2005 after previously working at the University of New Hampshire, Emory University, and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan. Kuriyama's 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 book, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (Zone, 1999), received the 2001 William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and has been translated into Chinese, Greek, Spanish, and Korean. His recent work includes studies on the history of distraction, the imagination of strings in the experience of presence, the transformation of money into a palpable humor in Edo Japan, the nature of hiddenness in traditional Chinese medicine, and the web of connections binding ginseng, opium, tea, silver, and MSG. Kuriyama has also been actively engaged in expanding the horizons of teaching and scholarly communication through the creative use of digital technologies both at Harvard and at other universities in the US and abroad.