Abstract
For thousands of years, scientists have studied human anatomy by dissecting bodies. Our knowledge of their findings is limited, however, both by the subsequent loss of many of the oldest texts, and by a tendency toward a Eurocentric perspective in medicine. As a discipline, anatomy tends to be much more familiar with ancient Greek texts than with those from India, China, or Persia. Here, we show that the Mawangdui medical texts, entombed in the Mawangdui burial site in Changsha, China 168 BCE, are the oldest surviving anatomical atlas in the world. These medical texts both predate and inform the later acupuncture texts which have been the foundation for acupuncture practice in the subsequent two millennia. The skills necessary to interpret them are diverse, requiring the researcher firstly to read the original Chinese, and secondly to perform the anatomical investigations that allow a re-viewing of the structures that the texts refer to. Acupuncture meridians are considered to be esoteric in nature, but these texts are clearly descriptions of the physical body. As such, they represent a previously hidden chapter in the history of anatomy, and a new perspective on acupuncture.
Highlights
Studying anatomy via direct dissection of the human body has been the “gold standard” in Western medicine since the Renaissance (1300–1600 CE) (Porter, 2017)
We suggest that the primary reason for this is not that Confucianism renders anatomical study through dissection inherently implausible, instead, we propose that reading these texts requires the ability to view the anatomy of the body through a naive lens that is significantly different to our modern perception of science and medicine
In the text above, we have shown how the text of the Mawangdui medical manuscripts maps onto the structures visible in a human cadaver
Summary
Studying anatomy via direct dissection of the human body has been the “gold standard” in Western medicine since the Renaissance (1300–1600 CE) (Porter, 2017). The study of the Mawangdui medical texts offers us both a unique window into ancient Chinese anatomical knowledge, and a chance to rediscover this way of seeing and mapping the human body. There are three anatomical manuscripts which differ in their details but generally contain similar material (Changsha Mawangdui Han Dynasty Tombs Exhibition Hunan Provincial Museum, n.d.) They were written around 300–200 BCE (Yimou et al, 1988), broadly contemporaneously with the now-lost dissectionbased texts of Herophilus and Erisastratus (Lloyd & Sivin, 2002). There is no mention of either acupuncture, or acupuncture points found in Mawangdui This information is all contained in the later Neijing text, which clearly indicates that mapping the body was an area of active anatomical research in the Han era, with a progression of ideas over time. Seeing the anatomy in the Mawangdui texts requires an effort to shift out of our familiar paradigms and explore the body from a viewpoint that to us is new
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