ABOUT | EXHIBITION | VIEW
Pulses were difficult to grasp. The ancient technique of feeling at the wrist remained a key component in classical forms of health diagnosis. (Kuriyama 2002; Wujastyk 2003; Hsu 2005) In the classical text Mai Jing 脉经 first composed during the Western Jin (265‒316), pulses were not the geometric movement of beats and rhythms, but instead textures that came in over two dozen types. Some felt like “sawing a bamboo” while others felt like “rain-soaked sand.” (Kuriyama 2002, 78) These signs determined the patient’s interior life. They expressed the nature of previous and impending states of health and disease. They connected to the internal organs and indicated depletion of internal Qi and other types of Chinese humours.
Pulses remained so important to medical training and treatment that centuries later, the Jesuit missionary Michael Boym translated Mai Jing in his seventeenth century manual, Specimen Medicinae Sinicae (1682), which played a crucial role in introducing Chinese pulse diagnosis to readers in Europe. Centuries later, pulses have been stripped to a simple beat. In contemporary biomedicine, pulses exist as systolic contractions and diastolic expansions. They move like a metronome, running slow at 70 bpm or fast at 120 bpm even when other physiological expressions remain, offering a broad taxonomy of signs, though few are able to read it.
This workshop aims to spatially capture the many dimensions of pulse reading. Through a collaboration among medical scholars, cognitive scientists, and artists, this workshop invites creative coders to teach participants how to create responsive digital mapping for displaying biometric information. It begins with a primary source analysis of the Mai Jing and Specimen Medicinae Sinicae where participants compare the visual and discursive representation of pulse types in each text. Next, participants will apply these sensations to styles of touch to feel for the sometimes slippery, rough, sunken, or hollow pulses before translating touch through digital coding to create animated shapes and sounds. Then, these pulses will be projected and exhibited online or in a public space.
As a collaboration among medical scholars, cognitive scientists, and artists, this inaugural workshop will teach participants how to use responsive digital mapping to display biometric information often overlooked in biomedical discourses of health practice. It will represent physiological expressions of the body absent in biomedical frameworks to transform the qualitative experience of expressive bodies into visual data. These kinds of qualitative, textured expressions of the body engage with different cosmologies, which we aim to not only work into everyday language, but also re-represent across multiple modes of visual and auditory expression. (Li 2020)
In particular, this workshop will feature a two-day crash course to train participants in using a visually-oriented coding language called Processing, an open-source language and IDE (integrated development environment) based on Java. Processing will allow participants to translate haptic sensations into animated shapes, sounds, and colors. As a coding language, Processing is a flexible graphical interface commonly used among artists, and as a practical tool, can be connected to microprocessor boards such as Arduino, as well as interactive design kits like p5js, among others. This aspect of the workshop will offer basic skills for participants to engage with more creative coding platforms and expand their capacity for collaboration.
The workshop’s spatial component relies on active translation based through participants’ awareness of their interior bodily movements and its exterior expression. Pulses introduce a critical engagement with body kinesthetics through touch, and from touch to words, and from words into images. Palpation takes into account bodily kinetics where each participant will need to articulate their physical state and physical position, given that standing, sitting, and lying down in addition to their states of health will change the expression of their various pulses. Because pulses involve the interaction between two people, the individual taking the pulse will need to be actively aware of their own bodies as they press upon a colleague’s wrist. To whom do the pulses belong?
From this, participants will develop their own visual scheme for pulses that include characteristics such as floating, superficial, knotted, bound, surging, flooding, excess, full, replete, forceful, leathery, drumskin, tympanic, hard, slippery, rolling, hollow or scallion stalk, green onion, tight, tense, soft or soggy, long, scattered, wiry, taut, forceless, empty, deficient, minute, faint, indistinct, deep, thready, thin, hidden, short, firm, confined, regularly intermittent, weak, rapid, slow, racing, swift, hurried, slowed down, moderate, or relaxed, rapid-irregular, skipping, abrupt, choppy, hesitant, moving, throbbing, stirring, knotted, bound, large, big.
Processing will allow participants to design animations that can be projected and shared. The final display of the projections will be configured in either on online or live exhibition. A live exhibition will involve two individuals, where a palpator and palpatee articulate sensations of up to twenty-eight different textures of pulses, described in the Mojue. From this, they will create their own catalogue of animations. As an interactive piece, users will be able to select from this catalogue of live animations to create a profile of their own pulses either on their own or with a collaborator. Animations will also be posted and made available online for artists, cognitive scientists, physiologists, and students to use. Given the preliminary nature of this workshop, the Processing component of the workshop will train participants to animate five of the twenty-eight pulses.
Bio-ecosystems
By imagining the body through the pulses, this workshop joins new ambitions emergent in the medical and digital humanities. As a digital project, it takes into account the ethics of transforming the body into a biometric object and the ways in which participants will be embedded within “media ecosystems.” Much like Rita Charon’s emphasis on the power of storytelling in medicine (Charon 2008), the visual representation of the body’s inner life can reveal how individuals relate to their own bodies and the limits of their autonomy within medical discourses of health and disease. This level of self-awareness that the humanities brings to digital projects demonstrates a turning point in what Kirsten Ostherr has described as the digital health humanities. (Ostherr 2019) The appropriation of self-tracking data as form of biocapital extends from technological hegemonies that reinforce new forms of what Deleuze has called “control societies.” (Schüll 2018) Indeed, scholars in the social scientists and humanities are often skeptical about the promises of large data sets and the ways in which these data sets are subject to broader cultural, political, economic, and rhetorical influences. (Ruckenstein and Schüll 2017) Digitizing pulses is at once a personal and political act.
This workshop on digitally translating pulses has high and low and ambitions. It aims to reinstate individual agency through teaching humanities scholars creative coding while also rendering early modern Chinese/European styles of pulse—a qualitative, affective mode of haptic inquiry—into biometric art. As media scholar Wendy Chun put it, big data is drama. (Chun 2016) Media practices welcome universal participation and universal surveillance, yet individuals can participate as a form of resistance. To re-interpret biological data is to perform it. To re-fine biological data is to give it life. The aesthetic transformation of pulse into sound, image, and animation not only transforms the body into art but in doing so, introduces otherwise ignored cosmologies of the body into the everyday.
People
Tristan Revells (instructor) is an active member of the creative coding community, and serves as the COO of OFCourse (ofcourse.io), a Shanghai-based design and tech platform for which he frequently runs workshops and courses. His most recent work is a digital humanities project initiated at the Science History Institute which uses 3D modeling software to rebuild China’s first large-scale ethanol plant from archival blueprints and photographs.In addition to his work in creative coding, Tristan is a historian of the renewable energy industry in China. His dissertation focuses on the dongli jiujing biofuel program of the late 1930s and 40s, an alternative fuel program which emerged from the research of Chinese and Japanese biochemists and microbiologists in the late Qing and early Republican era.
Lan A. Li (chair) is a historian of the body and filmmaker focusing on medicine and health in global East Asia. Li received their PhD in History, Anthropology, and Science Technology and Society Studies from MIT in 2016 and served as a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University. Lan is currently an Assistant Professor in the Medical Humanities Program and History Department at Rice University. Li’s film and media work has led to collaborations with medical practitioners in Shanghai, Mumbai, São Paulo, New York, and Boston. She is the co-founder and co-host of the exhibition Metaphors of the Mind and founder of the Digital Oncology Initiative.
References
Dominik Wujastyk, trans., The Roots of Ayurveda, Reissue edition (London; New York: Penguin Classics, 2003).
Elisabeth Hsu, “Tactility and the Body in Early Chinese Medicine,” Science in Context; Cambridge 18, no. 1 (March 2005): 7–34.
Kirsten Ostherr, “Digital Health Humanities,” in Research Methods in Health Humanities, ed. Craig M. Klugman and Erin Gentry Lamb, 1 edition (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019), 182–200.
Lan A. Li, “Medical Poetics: Global Health Humanities on Film and the Case of 心,” in The Routledge Companion to Health Humanities, ed. Paul Crawford, Brian Brown, and Andrea Charise, 1 edition (S.l.: Routledge, 2020), 163–72.
Minna Ruckenstein and Natasha Dow Schüll, “The Datafication of Health,” Annual Review of Anthropology 46, no. 1 (2017): 261–78.
Natasha Dow Schüll, “Self in the Loop: Bits, Patterns, and Pathways in the Quantified Self,” in A Networked Self and Human Augmentics, Artificial Intelligence, Sentience (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), 25–38.
Rita Charon, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness, 1 edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Sanneke Kloppenburg and Irma van der Ploeg, “Securing Identities: Biometric Technologies and the Enactment of Human Bodily Differences,” Science as Culture, September 19, 2018, 1–20.
Shigehisa Kuriyama, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (New York: Zone Books, 2002).
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Big Data as Drama,” ELH 83, no. 2 (January 1, 2016): 363–82.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, On Sourcery and Source Codes (The MIT Press, 2011).
OTHER RELEVANT SOURCES
compiled by Dr. James Clifton
Primary Sources
[Allemand, Louis-Augustin.] Les secrets de la medecine des chinois, consistant en la parfaite connoissance du pouls. Envoyez de la Chine par vn François, homme de grand merite. Grenoble, 1671.
[Boym, Michael]. Specimen medicinae sinicae, sive opuscula medica ad mentem sinensium. Ed. Andreas Cleyer. Frankfurt, 1682.
De explanatione pulsuum regulae, et discursuum verorum by “Vám Xó Hó” [Wang Shu-he] (48 pp.);
Pulsibus explanatis medendi regula by “Vám Xŏ Hŏ” [Wang Shu-he] (54 pp.);
Tractatus de pulsibus, ab erudito Europaeo collectus, including codex “Nuy kim” (99 + 9 unnumbered pp.); [30 plates];
De indiciis morborum ex linguae coloribus & affectionibus (16 pp.).
Boym, Michael. Clavis medica ad chinarum doctrinam de pulsibus. Ed. Andreas Cleyer. 1686.
Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste. Description geographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise. 4 vols. Paris, 1735 (esp. vol. 3, pp. 379-436).
Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste. A Description of the Empire of China and Chinese-Tartary, together with the Kingdoms of Korea, and Tibet: Containing the Geography and History (Natural as well as Civil) of those Countries. 2 vols. London, 1738-1741 (vol. 2, pp. 184-207: Wang-shû-ho, “The Secret of the Pulse”; trans. into French by Julien-Placide Hervieu, S.J.).
Floyer, John. The Physician’s Pulse-Watch; or, an Essay to Explain the Old Art of Feeling the Pulse, and to Improve it by the Help of a Pulse-Watch. London, 1707 (esp. pp. 227-440).
Fouquet, Henri. Essai sur le pouls, par rapport aux affections des principaux organes, avec des figures qui représentent les caracteres du pouls, dans ces affection. Montpellier, 1767.
Harvey, William. Exercitatio anatomica de motv cordis et sangvinis in animalibvs. Frankfurt, 1628.
Mercado, Luis. De pvlsibvs libri dvo in qvibvs tota ars cognoscendi morbos, et prognosticandi disertissime tractatvr. Padua, 1592.
Santorio, Santorio. Commentaria in primam fen primi libri canonis Auicennae. Venice, 1625.
Sassonia, Ercole. De pvlsibvs tractatus obsolutissimus, omnibvs medicinae stvdiosis apprime necessarius & vtilis. Frankfurt, 1604.
Struthius, Joseph (Józef Struś). Sphygmicae artis iam mille dvcentos annos perditae & desideratae Libri V. Basel, [1555]. (Further editions, with variant titles: Venice, 1573; Basel, 1602.)
Secondary Sources
Barnes, Linda L. Needles, Herbs, Gods, and Ghosts: China, Healing, and the West to 1848. Cambridge, MA, 2005.
Bigotti, Fabrizio, and David Taylor. “The Pulsilogium of Santorio: New Light on Technology and Measurement in Early Modern Medicine.” Soc Politica (Societate si Politica) 11 (2017) 53-113.
Hanson, Marta, and Gianna Pomata. “Medicinal Formulas and Experiential Knowledge in the Seventeenth-Century Epistemic Exchange between China and Europe.” Isis 108 (2017) 1-25.
Hanson, Marta, and Gianna Pomata. “Travels of a Chinese Pulse Treatise: The Latin and French Translations of the Tuzhu maijue bianzhen 圖註脈訣辨真 (1650s–1730s).” In Harold J. Cook, ed., Translation at Work: Chinese Medicine in the First Global Age. Clio Medica, 100. Leiden, 2020, pp. 23-57.
Hsu, Elisabeth. “Towards a Science of Touch, Part I: Chinese Pulse Diagnostics in Early Modern Europe.” Anthropology & Medicine 7 (2000) 251-68.
Hsu, Elisabeth. “Towards a Science of Touch, Part II: Representations of the Tactile Experience of the Seven Chinese Pulses Indicating Danger of Death in Early Modern Europe.” Anthropology & Medicine 7 (2000) 319-33.
Hsu, Elisabeth. Pulse Diagnosis in Early Chinese Medicine: The Telling Touch. Cambridge, 2010.
Kajdański, Edward. “Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus.” T’oung Pao 73 (1987) 161-89.
Kajdański, Edward. “Michael Boym’s Medicus Sinicus: New Facts, Reflections, Conclusions.” T’oung Pao 103 (2017) 448-72.
Kümmel, Werner Friedrich. “Der Puls und das Problem der Zeitmessung in der Geschichte der Medizin.” Medizinhistorisches Journal 9 (1974) 1-22.
Kuriyama, Shigehisa. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York, 1999.
Lehner, Georg. China in European Encyclopaedias, 1700-1850. Leiden, 2011.
Marié, Éric. Le diagnostic par les pouls en Chine et en Europe: Une histoire de la sphygmologie des origines au XVIIIe siècle. Dordrecht, 2011.
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Parker, Kim H. “A Brief History of Arterial Wave Mechanics.” Med Biol Eng Comput 47 (2009) 111-18.
Shryock, Richard H. “The History of Quantification in Medical Science.” Isis 52 (1961) 215-37.
Terada, Motoichi. “The Montpellier Version of Sphygmology: Classical Chinese Medicine and Vitalism.” In Harold J. Cook, ed., Translation at Work: Chinese Medicine in the First Global Age. Clio Medica, 100. Leiden, 2020, pp. 176-205.
Townsend, Gary L. “Sir John Floyer (1649-1734) and His Study of Pulse and Respiration.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 22 (1967) 286-316.
