Reviewed by: The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece Steven Shankman (bio) Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin. The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002. xvii, 348 pp. Hardcover $40.00, ISBN 0-300-09297-0. Paperback $20.00, ISBN 0-300-10160-0. Classical studies in the West in the past few decades has confronted the same tumultuous challenges to traditionalism that have affected other humanistic fields, yet in many ways nothing fundamental has changed. It is true that the ancient texts have been reinterpreted from a variety of new perspectives, and courses such as Gender in the Ancient World have sexed up the classics-in-translation curriculum, but "classics" still means ancient Greece and Rome. The canon remains intact. And, as a result, fewer and fewer undergraduates choose to study the classics, and an even more miniscule number choose to do so in the original languages. Clearly something needs to change, especially in the light of the globalization of contemporary culture. How much more interesting and provocative the classics would be if students were asked to study ancient Greece and China, where the contrasts between these two extraordinary and influential cultures are so marked and so revealing, the terrain so relatively unexplored! Yet the power of convention is strong and the perils of comparative Sino-Hellenic studies are many. Its students must learn two very different and challenging languages. And while the contrasts between the two cultures are endlessly thought-provoking, students must be wary, in the enthusiasm of their comparativist endeavors, of making sweeping generalizations about each culture. Geoffrey Lloyd and Nathan Sivin have written a stimulating, learned, and important book that, while painting very different and contrasting images of the styles of scientific and medical inquiry in early China and Greece, avoids precisely this kind of cultural stereotyping, this trafficking in vague essences. The book is divided into six chapters: (1) "Aims and Methods," (2) "The Social and Institutional Framework of the Chinese Sciences," (3) "The Social and Institutional Framework of Greek Science," (4) "The Fundamental Issues of Greek Science," (5) "The Fundamental Issues of the Chinese Sciences," and (6 ) "Chinese and Greek Sciences Compared." There is also an appendix on the evolution of Chinese cosmology. The authors focus on investigating what they call the cultural "manifold" in which scientific and medical inquiry was pursued in China and Greece between the years 400 b.c. and a.d. 200. Employing the method established by Geoffrey Lloyd in his earlier pioneering books on comparative Sino Hellenic studies, the authors rightly reject the approach of associating cultures with abstract and mystically bestowed "mentalities." Rather, they describe the social [End Page 422] frameworks and institutions from which the distinctive styles of early Chinese and Greek thought emerged. Lloyd and Sivin make useful distinctions between Chinese and Greek styles of talking about scientific and medical pursuits. The "Chinese norms," they argue, "were identification with a group and aspiration toward an imagined orthodoxy. . . . They were the mirror image of the Hellenic emphasis on a thinker's own ideas even when he belonged nominally to a group" (p. 44). Chinese scholars tended to think "of ideas embodied in teachers" and this "discouraged open disputes with contemporary rivals over concepts" (p. 52). They thought of themselves as participating in lineages (jia) rather than as individual members of competing schools of thought. For Chinese thinkers (with the exception of Zhuangzi, one must observe) "it was not permissible to wander wherever the intellect leads" (p. 65). The Chinese, as opposed to the Greeks, "take exception to people—mostly dead ones—not to disembodied ideas" (ibid.). "The Chinese mirror image of Greek public debate was a tendency to seek agreement and to claim it even when it did not exist" (p. 81). "Compared with their Chinese counterparts, Greek intellectuals were far more often isolated from the seats of political power" (p. 102). The Greeks, in their quest for truth, preferred truth to friendship (p. 118). While the Chinese worked toward consensus and harmony, "the fundamental competitiveness of Greek medical practice is evident" (p. 131 ); in Greece, "the...
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Jan 1, 2005
Chuimei Ho 
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