Overview

“Medical knowledge in practice, Medical practice as knowledge”

This workshop is the second in a two-year program of workshops on humanities and social science approaches to understanding medicine in East Asia, jointly organized and sponsored by the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong (香港大學), the Institute of Medical Humanities and Centre for History of Medicine at Peking University (北京大學) , and the Key Research Institute of Social History of China at Nankai University (南開大學). The training workshop will be conducted in English at Nankai University, Tianjin, on August 1-8, 2016.

Medicine is a body of knowledge inseparable from philosophy, cosmology and religion. It is also a system of practices framed by social structures and economic forces, and dependant on material objects such as plants, minerals, instruments, and the physical body. How does medical knowledge generate practice, and practice inform knowledge? How does the interplay between the two differ in history, and in different cultures? What can a medical case history, or a particular drug reveal about knowledge and practice in a cultural context? This training workshop will encompass historical and contemporary perspectives, highlighting the relevance of medicine to humanities and social science analyses of East Asia and facilitating creative conversations among young researchers under the guidance of leading scholars in medical history. The participating senior faculty will be:

• Angela Leung 梁其姿 (The University of Hong Kong)
• Xinzhong Yu 余新忠 (Nankai University)
• Daqing Zhang 張大慶 (Peking University)
• Shigehisa Kuriyama 栗山茂久 (Harvard University)
• Gianna Pomata (Johns Hopkins University)
• Jeremy Greene (Johns Hopkins University)