“Kuriyama frames the contrast between medicine in China and in the West with a brilliant and marvelously detailed analysis of ancient Greek and Chinese medicine. All told, this is an astonishingly original reading of early medicine.”
—Arthur Kleinman, Harvard Medical School and Harvard University

“Kuriyama offers the reader not just a history of ancient beliefs about the body, but an inspiring account of different ways of inhabiting the world.”
—Geoffrey Lloyd, University of Cambridge

“A masterpiece of historical scholarship. Beautifully written, the book challenges our conventional ways of seeing and discerning reality.”
—Günter B. Risse, University of California, San Francisco

*Complex Chinese translation rights sold.
*An illuminating account of how early medicine in Greece and China perceived the human body.
*Winner of the William H. Welch Medal, American Association for the History of Medicine.

A meditation on the human body as described by the classical Greeks and by the ancient Chinese.

At the heart of medical history is a deep enigma. The true structure and workings of the human body are, we casually assume, everywhere the same, a universal reality. But then we look into the past, and our sense of reality wavers: accounts of the body in diverse medical traditions often seem to describe mutually alien, almost unrelated worlds. The Expressiveness of the Body meditates on the contrasts between the human body described in classical Greek medicine and the body as envisaged by physicians in ancient China. It asks how this most basic of human realities came to be conceived by two sophisticated civilizations in radically diverging ways. And it seeks answers in fresh and unexpected topics, such as the history of tactile knowledge, the relationship between ways of seeing and ways of listening, and the evolution of bloodletting.

Shigehisa Kuriyama is a Japanologist and historian of medicine. He is the Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History at Harvard University.

Kuriyama has taught at the University of New Hampshire, Emory University (where he was the Chair for its Institute for the Liberal Arts (ILA)) in Atlanta, Georgia, and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan.

He authored The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (1999), a study of the different views of health and medicine held by the ancient Western civilization and Eastern civilizations. This book won the 2001 William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine.

Kuriyama joined the Harvard faculty as Reischauer Professor in 2005. In 2013 he delivered the Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures, "What Truly Matters."