This accompanies Marta Hanson’s BJHS Themes Open Access article From under the elbow to pointing to the palm: Chinese metaphors for learning medicine by the book (fourth–fourteenth centuries)

When I was a chair of a panel at a workshop at Princeton University during the summer of 2018 on Learning by the Book: Manuals and Handbooks in the History of Knowledge, it struck me that the hand was not one of the most dominant metaphors for comparable “handy” handbooks in Chinese medical publishing. This contrast struck me as a puzzling difference worth exploring more deeply. Pointing to the palm, on the other hand, was a metaphor used for Chinese medical handbooks that, as far as I knew, did not exist in European publishing history. As a contributor to the “Learning by the Book” project that ended up becoming a special issue of BJHS Themes, I decided to use the opportunity to explore what metaphors over a millennium had been used for the earliest Chinese medical texts to indicate that they had been structured for easier access.

My article thus focuses on transformations in the main metaphors in ancient to late medieval titles of Chinese medical books used to convey to potential readers their ‘learning-by-the-book’ contents. In contrast to the European preference for hand metaphors in the genre terms – enchiridions, manuals and handbooks – the Chinese medical archive preserves bodily metaphors within which the hand metaphor appears only rarely in the early medieval period. Hand metaphors were superseded by metaphors. “Pointing to the palm” (zhizhang) became both metaphor for mastery of knowledge and a genre term for learning-by-the-book medical texts in the early modern period. Innovations in textual reorganization intended to facilitate ‘learning by the book’ were often creatively captured in an illuminating range of genre distinctions, descriptors and metaphors. The two images featured below show two versions of how the term “pointing to the palm” (zhizhang) was used to indicate a medical hand mnemonic (Leijing tuyi 1782), as seen in the image to the left (and in the header), as well as a genre term for Mastery as in “Pulse Rhymes [as if] Pointing to the Palm” (Maijue zhizhang), as seen in the image to the right.

Read Marta Hanson’s Open Access article in full

Read the full Open Access BJHS Themes issue Learning by the Book: Manuals and Handbooks in the History of Science

Main image and all other images supplied by the author.