History of beliefs about the human body

Today gender, sex, and identity continue to be of much debate and change based on what place and people are being examined.

Conceptions of the body are primarily either eastern, based in China and involving practices such as Traditional chinese medicine, or western, which follows the Greek traditions of science and is more closely related to modern science despite original anatomists and ideas of the body being just as unscientific as Chinese practices.

In Western historical research, scholars began investigating the cultural history of the human body in detail in the 1980s.

[4] Porter pointed out that Western historiography had previously assumed mind–body dualism (i.e. that the body is fundamentally separate from the mind or soul) and therefore that the cultural history of bodies as material objects had been overlooked: 'given the abundance of evidence available, we remain remarkably ignorant about how individuals and social groups have experienced, controlled, and projected their embodied selves.

Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's 1965 Rabelais and His World, they promoted a more materially orientated direction in the history of the body.

[2][7] The Ebers Papyrus is an Egyptian medical text and is the oldest known record of the human body, dating back to 3000 BC.

The distinct medical tone focuses on what can be felt externally to infer the maladies of the body.

Therefore, the body in Greek and European cultures is defined as being ailed by something physical, something that can be found and altered to produce order.

Laqueur argued that from the eighteenth century into the late twentieth, Western societies had generally thought of humans as having two fundamentally sexes, male and female.

But Laqueur argued that from ancient times, the prevailing intellectual understanding of sex was that women were anatomically simply an inferior form of men.

For example, Renaldus Columbus, writing about what he proposed as the discovery of the clitoris, stated that, "like a penis, "if you touch it, you will find it rendered a little harder and oblong to such a degree that it shows itself as a sort of male member."

(There was much debate on the actual discovery of the clitoris between male European scientists and many claimed to have described it first: by dissecting the human body and writing down what was observed these European scientists could claim in their idea of the body that they had discovered or created new knowledge.)

This one-sex model was seen as consistent, in Abrahamic thought, with the Genesis creation narrative, in which Eve is formed from Adam's rib.

[15] However, scholars specialising in pre-eighteenth-century history have often been critical of the idea that the one-sex body really was dominant in everyday life, or even in intellectual circles.

[17] The Inner Cannon was revised by natural Philosophers of the time and the approved version of the Han Court and became a foundational text for the ideals and perceptions of the human body.

It focused on Qi, Yin and Yang balance, and Five phase theory to explain health can disease.

[17] These are variations and representations of qi that define how a human exists in the world, a system of complementary opposites.

These representations of the physical world in the body was understood dynamically and represents a deeper connection to the non animate objects and surroundings of a human.

Cheng Congzhou a physician in 1581 was a local doctor in Yangshou and documented his patient encounters in detail.

The importance of not only qi but blood is seen in his records:[17] Fang Shunian's mother, the scholar's Honored Lady,4 was sixty three years old.