For the Medical Record - Lan Edited
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Mia Levenson: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to For the Medical Record, a podcast from Johns Hopkins University's Center for the Medical Humanities and Social Medicine. We are your hosts, Mia Levenson.

Richard Del Rio: I'm Richard Del Rio

Mia Levenson: And we're so excited for our guest today. We have Lan Li, an assistant professor here at Johns Hopkins at our very own Institute for the History of Medicine.

They're also the director for the online program in the History of Medicine. Lan is here to talk to us about their new book, fresh out from Johns Hopkins University Press: "Body Maps: Improvising Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine".

Richard Del Rio: This is going to be an interesting book to talk about because throughout human history, our search for progress and knowledge in the fields of medicine and science has oftentimes required us to look for [00:01:00] what couldn't be seen with our physical senses and to create images to explain them to others. Whether those explanations were grounded in spirits or metaphysical energies, microbes, or new proteins, for example. I think that this is really is a relevant point today in consideration of how much weight we put into imaging of the human brain and the larger meanings we attribute to these depictions for the people whose brains are being scanned. This week, we're going to continue in our global history trend with Chinese medicine utilized in the treatment of neuropathy. We will try to explore these unseen forces or channels called jingluo that are claimed to affect our experience of sensation and offer another perspective on the idea of our minds as experienced, embodied, but nevertheless unseen things.

Mia Levenson: Because podcasting is an auditory medium, we wanted to give you a sense of what these anatomical [00:02:00] illustrations that Lan will be talking to us about look like. So in the preface of the book, there is a line drawing of the upper half of a human body drawn out in black ink.

It's quite a busy image. There are circular points located around the body, connecting these points are parallel lines, like paths going from point to point, sometimes crisscrossing or branching out into multiple points. These parallel lines represent the 12 primary meridians. All in all, it kind of looks like a subway map where you have marginalia in Chinese characters to the sides of these points, to the side of the figure itself, serving as kind of a legend to understand this body map. So with that in mind, we'll jump into our conversation with Lan.

Welcome to the podcast, Lan.

Lan Li: Hello, hello. Hi. Thanks for having me again.

Mia Levenson: Of course.

Yeah. Well I was gonna say you're For the Medical Record's first, repeat guest. [00:03:00] Congratulations, very first time we've had a repeat guest. You know I was re-listening to the episode you did back with Christy and Antoine in 2022. And you're talking a little bit about your book project in that podcast. So that was three years ago. Now the book is out, it's published. How has your thinking about body maps changed or evolved since then? Are there any new resonances that you're seeing or feeling with this material that, that you've been looking at for for all these years?

Lan Li: When you sent the questions, I was thinking a lot about what's changed in the last three years and the kind of, um. Three years is a bit arbitrary. I didn't know then that I would come back now. And a lot has changed in the sense that the, having the physical book, forces me to engage with the social world in a different way, completely different way.

Now, there's an object that I can offer as a gift. It's my gift back to the people who have [00:04:00] helped me think through a lot of these questions. And I mean, I, I dedicated the book to my family because it was, I, I started this project because I wanted to, in my senior year, junior senior year of college, I wanted to have a project that allowed me to see my grandparents in Beijing.

So my mom was like, you could just look at integrative medicine. And so much of my early academic training was in biomedicine. And um, a lot of it was very Eurocentric and I didn't have very clear models of what looking at global histories of medicine or integrative medicine or Asian medicine. I didn't have models at the time, and this was, um, 20 2006 to 2010.

Um, there were books that came out. Like Shigehisa's Expressiveness of the Body was already out. There are lots of books in religion that have been out. I'm sitting next to Michael Strickman's book, Chinese Magical Medicine, and so a lot of the things that [00:05:00] I'm reading now are part of this, I guess now lifelong journey. So it's not just the last three years, but it's definitely, it definitely is a huge shift, a huge change.

Richard Del Rio: Maybe we should get into the book, you know about what it's about. I find it interesting that this book about global Chinese medicine opens up when an anecdote in Brazil

Lan Li: Mm-hmm.

Richard Del Rio: and you are interviewing a practitioner of acupuncture and as well as, excuse me, but it's hard for me to pronounce the term if you could.

Lan Li: Moxibustion ,

Richard Del Rio: Moxibustin. Thank you. So I, what I found really interesting, right, is that the title of the book is about global Chinese medicine. But you make the point that there is [00:06:00] no single Chinese medicine, rather many kinds around the world. And you say you're describing a history, before Chinese medicine was Chinese.

Lan Li: Mm-hmm.

Richard Del Rio: Can you elaborate on that and then, and also speak to what particular aspects of Chinese medicine this book focuses on.

Lan Li: Mm mm Yeah. So it's funny because you see Chinese in the title, Chinese Medicine in the title. You see me completely taking it apart in the introduction, and then for the rest of the book, I don't return to it ever again. It's a way in because I need to have a starting point for my readers. People would be interested in acupuncture and moxibustin. Maybe people have had acupuncture before, or maybe they're vaguely aware of whatever Chinese medicine is. And for a lot of my career, I've been working to offer a different way of thinking and talking about this cosmology, this practice, assuming that it's so discreet 'cause [00:07:00] it's not.

The classic history of modern Chinese medicine is that traditional Chinese medicine was invented in the 1950s with the rise of the Chinese Communist Party. Sean Lei has written about how in the 1930s, 1920s, 1930s, uh, members of the, I mean, in the nationalist government, were trying to regulate Chinese medicine and named it for the first time by naming it all these practitioners who were very local, who had lots of family lineages and had a huge diversity of diagnosis and therapeutics. They came together for the first time because they had to be regulated or because they were responding to the attempt to regulate. And ever since then, the institutionalization has created the Chineseness of Chinese medicine.

And we can talk about tariffs if you want, but like, but even accessing some of these herbs, some of them are grown in like Madison, Wisconsin. Some of them are grown in, in parts of East Africa. So whatever this global marketplace, it has been [00:08:00] global for a very long time, but the branding, the nationalist branding is, is somewhat new in the larger scheme of things.

Mia Levenson: I think this gets to the heart of the word global in your title.

Some of the forms of, of medical practices you're talking about. Um. May often be used in China or, or may have originated in China, but

Lan Li: Mm-hmm.

Mia Levenson: that they have these practices that are sort of all, um, all across the world. And, you are specifically talking about these anatomical illustrations, which you refer to as meridians, right. These

Lan Li: Mm.

Mia Levenson: like, um, nerve, uh, correct me if, if I'm completely off, but these kind of like nerve centric images that are using sort of like lines to essentially graph out, different understandings of, of the nervous system.

Lan Li: Well, some people say, say that's nerves, but the, the argument of the book is that it's actually when it, the way that it treats nerves is that it shows how nerves are actually [00:09:00]

Mia Levenson: mm-hmm.

Lan Li: an unstable model of modernity and nerves are actually, one of your questions was about improvisation, but nerves, the images of neuroanatomy is actually more improvisatory

Than meridian tu. These, these, uh, these charts of meridian paths, which represent channels in the body called jingluo and jingmai. So some people say it's nerve centric, but when you actually get to what nerves are and what they represent and how they manifest in the body, it's it's all up in the air. It's wild. It's wild how unstable they are and how hard it is to really pin nerves down in a way that it's not, it's almost more intuitive to pin meridians down for practitioners, but nerves serve as a, as a larger metaphor.

Mia Levenson: Thank you for elaborating on that. The thing I'm interested in with, with this kind of idea of a, of a global form of medicine, right, is the way that you're tracking, the way that they're moving across time and across space. um, and I'm curious for you, like, why have these images in particular,

Lan Li: Mm

Mia Levenson: lived [00:10:00] on in practitioners' clinics among other spaces for for so long, for these sort of centuries that you're walking us through in this book.

Lan Li: Mm

A lot of the practitioners I talk to, they say that it's useful to, as a kind of heuristic, to talk about meridians, but they don't really use it in their own practice. They use it to teach, but not actively in their own practice. So I suspect that the images matter more to the image makers. What they actually mean, um, the book doesn't get into, but I suspect because I've seen these images, um appear in wood cuts or appear as wood cuts, engravings. Sometimes they're drawn by hand with a brush. Um, I've tried to reconstruct them myself. They hang in my office. And the images are interesting because they're actually not just used for needling and heating. Moxibustion is burning, um, moxi dust, mugwort on your skin at a high temperature. So. These images aren't just for that. You can actually access [00:11:00] them through meditation, Qigong practices, through herbs. You can access 'em both externally and internally. But the way that I, um, the way that I present meridians is that I actually make them interactive and I map my own out. And when you map them out, they have discreet links, they have, they all connect, they are associated with specific parts of the body. And the more that I think about meridians, the more like amazing they are because they extend the length of the body. They're actually much longer than your body. And they sink and they rise and they wiggle around. And I suspect that they also are meant to radiate outside the body too. They're kinda like antennae. So if you ever have the experience of being in acupuncture clinic, if your acupuncturist is like palpating a part of you, or even walks by sometimes different acupuncture points, they start to like light up.

And because I know where they are, I'm like, oh, like my spleen four on my foot is like, you know, or my, [00:12:00] my stomach 36 is is like hungry and these are contemporary names of these points and I'm starting to get kinda like, kind of technical about what these things are.

Um, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Richard Del Rio: so I was hoping that we could, uh,

Lan Li: You wanna get technical because it's, it gets really technical.

Richard Del Rio: I like getting technical. Don't get it wrong.

Lan Li: Mm-hmm.

Richard Del Rio: What I would like to do though, is before we continue on this discussion, let's hold our listeners hands a little bit, and

Lan Li: Mm-hmm.

Richard Del Rio: I think a great way to do that would be for you to just give us a few descriptions of what, um, someone would see if they were looking at a tu.

Lan Li: Before I get into this graphic genre of a tu, it took me a while to um, settle on the argument of the book, which is using graphic genre as a way to not only get into histories of science historiography, but also art history and also Chinese studies.

So, you know, Peter Galison, Lorraine Daston's classic book on objectivity is such a compelling way of thinking about images, and I always wondered [00:13:00] what is missing? What kinds of images don't fit in this history? What kinds of images and graphic genres that are also different or demand different epistemologies of the eye, what is missing here? And meridians are fascinating because they only exist as line drawings. They only exist in this graphic genre of a tu. And a tu is like, I mean, now, um, tu can be used to describe any image, but historically it was a specific kind of technical image. Um, Francesca Bray has edited a volume on graphics and text in China, and so this, uh, category of a tu, this, you can say that it's low tech if you wanna compare it to something that's quite expensive, but it is cheaper to draw by hand. But these paths only ever appear in a tu. Even now, if you have MRIs, x-rays, CT scans, you can't see these paths in full. They only appear all 12 pairs, 14 sets , [00:14:00] these lines only appear in this one graphic genre. And so, it's fascinating that these paths, that date to, um, archeological, um, figurines in antiquity, um. They appear as paths. They're buried with people.

They appear on sculptures and they appear on paper. Some of the images I look at, I mean the book starts in the 10th century, and that's not nearly early enough. So I start in the middle where these paths are already established. And so there are these 12 paths. These 12 pairs, there are many pairs, there are many paths in the body.

They connect to the organs and they move from the heads to the hand, to the feet. They are very remarkably, very consistent and persistent historically. So the 12 pairs have remained as 12 pairs. Their names have not changed for about 2000 years, maybe let's say for about at least a thousand years, and that is really interesting.

I don't mean to say that they're trans historical in this acontextual [00:15:00] sense, but they are remarkable because they're so stable. Meanwhile, acupuncture points have exploded. There used to be 360 classical sites, now they're like over 3000, and people are inventing more and more practices. So I'm interested in these paths, these paths in the body.

These are also some paths that I grew up with. Like I grew up practicing Qigong and um, and you imagine like the energy circulating among these paths. You can see them, you can feel them. They are corporeal, they are embodied, and they're quite easy to access if you pay attention and if you know where they are.

The images themselves are, uh, have this fascinating robustness that we don't see in neuroanatomy, and yet in the 19th century, physiologists are trying to explain what these paths are and they turn to neuroanatomy, this very imperfect, highly improvisatory set of images, and they fail over and over again.

And the book is about why we fail, and it makes the arguments that it's because of the images, it's because of the kind of [00:16:00] images that they are. This graphic genre that supports these invisible paths. Invisible in the sense that you can't see it with your naked eye. Even though in Japanese Buddhism, the flesh eye is the lowest form of seeing your mind's eye is much clearer.

So I'm not saying you can't see it if you like, close your eyes. But I mean, I talked to practitioners who were able to sense it and feel it, and they, they can see it in a sense they can sense it. So not trying to fetishize or reify vision, but the graphic images do something and the book has to select these case studies, these kind of fragments to make the argument to show what they are, what they do, why they never meet.

Mia Levenson: You use this like phrase of improvising or improvisation in the book. What really stuck out to me is when you make the comparison to jazz, right. for our listeners, can you explain what do you mean when you're using the term improvisation? What are these improvisations in the imagery? and maybe a little bit [00:17:00] about how they're shifting

Lan Li: Mm-hmm.

Mia Levenson: From creator to creator or across time or across space.

Lan Li: Hmm. I was really looking forward to this question 'cause I wanted to, um. I also wanted to ask what improv means to you as someone from performance studies because it's so intersubjective, like, there's something magical about improvisation and, and I am indebted to my, my friend colleague Andrew Goldman, who's a neuroscientist.

So I had a postdoc in neuroscience, um, and he worked on the neuroscience of improvisation, novelty, creativity. And he always asks this question, what are we measuring when we're trying to measure and study creativity? Because for him, maybe, improvisation was a way of knowing. And, and I thought about that.

Um, and I played with it myself and I was reading the literature that he was reading, and when I looked at my own images, I was thinking about the fact that they are hand drawn and that they are subject to kind of flourishes of, um, I mean, someone could [00:18:00] be shaking, someone could be quite skilled.

Compared to drawing it on a computer is a very different experience. The flourishes at you, the accidents that happen in a hand drawing, create something new that you just cannot, like with everything that's predetermined on a computer, you can't actually, you can't, you don't have the luxury of accident or accident in the same way.

So drawing something like tracing a line over and over again changes the, the, the quality of that image. And so I was thinking about, um, improvisation also maybe as a way of knowing, but also as part of the nature of these images and, and I use the example of nerves or improvising nerves. Or I introduced that, whenever I talk about the book, I talk about how nerves are more improvised, more highly improvised than meridians because you have so many images full of reflex arcs. You have all these, you know, like cell cell biology, like kreb cycle. You have arrows everywhere. And I remember when I was in a neuroscience conference, someone stood up and said, you know, these lines are [00:19:00] dirty. These are dirty lines. And I love that. Like this was when I was still working on the book as a postdoc. So for neuroscientists sometimes the overabundance of lines is, it's a performance of certainty and sometimes it forecloses the opportunity to explore what we don't know. So I think improv is a, I mean, I'm calling it improv even though I know it's not improv. It's not like intersubjective improv, but it is demanding a certain kind of, it makes them image, demand something and the, the artist demand something.

Mia Levenson: I wonder, and you brought up performance studies,

Lan Li: Please. Please.

Mia Levenson: talk

Lan Li: Yeah.

Mia Levenson: a little bit. I was actually thinking about theater, I was thinking about like my studies of East Asian Theater and the way that actors in styles like noh theater from Japan, From beijing Opera that the, that the movements and the gestures are very highly choreographed and actors

Lan Li: [00:20:00] Mm-hmm.

Mia Levenson: trained for years and years and years to perform like a very particular kind of choreography, a very particular kind of movement.

Lan Li: Mm-hmm.

Mia Levenson: the great actors from these different styles come from people who within these really highly stylized, highly codified movements

Lan Li: Mm-hmm.

Mia Levenson: Are able to do something slightly

Lan Li: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mia Levenson: new or different so the kind of improvisation you're really talking about, I feel like, isn't the improvisation of like improv comedy where, you know, people are shouting into an abyss and, and kind of seeing what sticks with an audience. and more so coming from a very like internalized, highly skilled sort of understanding of their practice and then using that knowledge and that that skill that they've built up over time to then play or explore.

Lan Li: Mm-hmm.

Mia Levenson: But it is, [00:21:00] it is so like I think the comparison with jazz music is so apt because it, it is coming from a knowledge of skill

Lan Li: Mm-hmm.

Mia Levenson: Uh, kind of it, it's less experimentation. I feel like it's, it's

Lan Li: Mm

Mia Levenson: of improvisation is less about experiment

Lan Li: mm.

Mia Levenson: more about like, uh, using all this knowledge and all this skill that you've built up to, to reimagine explore a bit.

Lan Li: I love that you get that. No, that's, yeah, it's not shouting into the void, even though I feel like that's a lot of what we do as professors who are like shouting and seeing what sticks. But no, it is from, um, the amount of skill that you're describing. So, um, the book, I think this is chapter two. I can't remember which chapter it was.

I talk a bit about math and cultures of accuracy through approximation, where you have very discreet lengths assigned to meridian paths. they total to 1,350 inches. they're very, [00:22:00] very discreet and yet they allow for a lot of flexibility.

It's a dynamic structure. The interaction and the use is dynamic and you do play within that, but the knowledge is really deep. But it requires so much skill, like you said, really deep training and the cosmology, the text. The position, the names, the lengths, they all, they all, are a form of this- they assemble this knowledge. Um, but the use of it and the embodiment, like, that's the expression that we don't see. And that's, And the book is only this, it's just the beginning of the conversation. It's just, it took me 15 years to write a book that tries to respond to the question of why meridians are not nerves. Why, why this this whole conversation about Asian medicine not being scientific. Why, Why, is that, um, a misguided or it, it sets us up for a very narrow way of thinking about bodies [00:23:00] and about practices and about, um, about, I mean, maybe about graphic genres, but it's, it's just the beginning.

Richard Del Rio: I, I, I drew more from when in, in thinking about improvising, I drew more from this idea of, of imperfect knowledge and inaccuracy. Um,

Lan Li: hmm.

Richard Del Rio: trying to bridge the gap between what is some kind of hidden truth and what we can describe or capture with our own senses. So we have these, we have these these lines, that are unseen and yet nonetheless have some kind of influence on our lived experiences. I guess in the view of practitioners in our health. Um, and it's depicted in these tus, right? Uh, I don't know. Can you pluralize tu by saying tus? Uh, I'm giving it a shot

Lan Li: Do whatever you want, we're improvising

Richard Del Rio: Because I have imperfect knowledge of this. [00:24:00]

Lan Li: Yeah, go ahead.

Richard Del Rio: Um, and I'm curious to know what the purpose is of what is the perceived purpose and how does that purpose change over time? I know people start trying to add meaning to it, connecting meridians to nerves, but if you could walk us through these ideas of jingmai and just help us understand, you know, because we have these unseen force, these unseen lines that we only see representations of them, whether it's on a wood carving, like in the shape of a human body, or an ink, an ink painting of a, of a human body with all these lines going through them and annotations and marginalia, describing what their influences are. I think it's very apt in comparison it, comparing it to the reflex arc, uh, nervous systems. 'cause you'll see that you'll oftentimes, you'll see, for example, a, a depiction of a person's finger on, on top of a candle. And you'll see lines and the lines describe how the nerves are giving information. So [00:25:00] what is the, you know, you're starting way far, pretty far in the past, but according to your own understanding of the field, the middle of the story. What is the perceived purpose or or idea of jingluo and jingmai.

Lan Li: Mm. So I love this question about what jingluo and jingmai are for, um, jing is, uh, you can, uh, describe it as these permanent paths, these permanent channels in the body that extend from the head to the hands, through the torso, to the feet. Um, they connect to particular important viscera in the body. Um, these are like the lungs, the heart, the kidney, liver, gallbladder, spleen, stomach, triple burner.

Um, am I missing something? Missing, uh, kidneys. I say kidney already. I mean the five to six viscera. Sometimes they are in a set of 12, but they sit at the core of the body and they can be accessed, these paths can be accessed, your health [00:26:00] can be accessed through either taking your pulse through diagnosis or through therapeutic treatments, either through, you can do needling, you can do moxa, but also you can access these paths internally with, um Qigong choreographies moving choreographies and herbs. So these paths are really robust, they're really dynamic, and in the book, I compare them to the soul and the mind, but the channels themselves are so much more and on their own, I would say that they are forms of technologies of life. They invite certain techniques and certain practices, and they're also part of a really intricate cosmology.

And here, by cosmology, I don't necessarily mean like stars and moon, I mean cosmology as a really intricate, complex network of causal relationships. So you can understand why if you're a practitioner, um, either someone who is, uh, you know, engaged in healing practices or if you just meditate on your own, um, [00:27:00] or if you're needling yourself or applying moxa for on your, on yourself or if you're understanding, you know, my, um, um. Forms of stress, um, how your body responds to anxiety. You can, um, understand how that might manifest in these paths that connect to different organs. And different organs can be reservoirs, they can be, um, places where different emotions can sit and they can also be places that receive certain kinds of injury.

So, emotional injury, getting yelled at, feeling stressed, um, having, uh, really extreme worry or panic, having extreme rage, all these things manifest in the body. They can ex be expressed through the paths and also they can be, um, addressed through different forms of therapeutic practices. So I. There are some practitioners, um, and some historians in our field who are trained as practitioners because they understand how these paths manifest, they can stop a stroke when they feel it happening. Or some practitioners got [00:28:00] into acupuncture because they watched someone else stop a heart attack. Um, when I was in Mumbai and interviewing rural physicians who talk about accessing different points in the body to address hypertension, they'll tell you, you know, these techniques are so robust. And if they're so robust and dynamic and effective, why don't we use them? Why don't we talk about them? So there's a bigger conversation about health and healing, but the paths themselves, I think, open up these questions. They open up questions about not just anatomy and not just about technology, but also about therapeutics and access.

So they are really in this question of what they're for. They're for so much, they're really cool and part of the reason that I wanted to write this book was because in a lot of history of science, we have, you know, recovering scientists who find themselves in this field, but they know so much about the actual, you know, scientific practice already.

Like I worked in an AIDS lab before I went into history of biology. [00:29:00] Um, and then from history of biology, I moved into history of science in East Asia and from history of science in East Asia, I then moved into, um, uh, you know, history of the body. So there is already a gateway. We are primed to think about systems because of STEM, because of STEM education, um, because of the world we live in.

And what I'm trying to do with this book is to introduce this other world, this world that is, that often is really densely articulated in technical books or encased in orientalist discourses, orientalist, aesthetics. And I'm trying to create symmetry in the book. I'm trying to offer a language, a new way of talking about this kind of technology, this kind of technique that exists in the body in a way that allows people to learn more, to build their curiosity and to shed some of these existing pre-existing notions of how to talk about this 'cause I don't use a language of east and [00:30:00] west. So the book is an invitation. It uses jingluo and jingmai as an invitation, um, it's an invitation to explore more about jingluo and jingmai. There are historians who have done this and I'm picking up where they left off.

Mia Levenson: This has been such a really wonderful conversation and we wanna sort of end it with thinking about, know, who who should read this book? Who are you hoping picks up this book?

Lan Li: I mean, when I wrote it, and I, I've rewritten this book so many times, I've started from scratch so many times. And it has been a project of trying to be clear to myself what I'm trying to say. And so I hope that. Anyone can really read it. Um, whether or not they get to different l like layers of the argument, that's totally up to whoever.

It's someone who, if you want images, like I, I was not a very, very, like, eager reader growing up. Like I loved images, which is why I have a book that has 70 images in it and I [00:31:00] pay more attention to the captions. Like, you could read the book just by looking at the captions, and that's why the, um, the open access supplement with all the images and color online, it just has captions in it. You could just look at the images. There are different ways to look at these sources closely. You don't really need me to walk you through it, but I do walk you through how I see it. Um, and so it's, it's for graduate students, if it's like a deep dive into methodology, I'm happy to talk about that for practitioners.

If it's a way to say why nerves are insufficient, and I've had some people reach out to me to say, this makes a lot of sense. Um, if it's for practitioners to understand why nerves are insufficient, that's great. If it's for just a, a lay public, trying to think about, not to say that there is like a distinction between graduate students in lay people, but like people who not, aren't necessarily familiar with the East Asian practices, if they wanna just read something and just to dip their toe into it. Cool. And then read the preface, like you don't really need to get much further beyond that preface, conclusion. Um, the deeper the body of the argument is, um, is I think if you [00:32:00] want to sit with the images a bit longer and get some historical context. That's what it's there for. If you wanna just look at the bibliography, like, I've assembled as much as I could because I worked between multiple fields. So you can read the bibliography, you can read the glossary if you want. Um, they're just different parts of the book that are, that, that allow the book to be read in different ways.

So whoever picks it up, you know, just dog ear it, do whatever you want. Um, and it's really outta my hands.

Mia Levenson: Do you wanna elaborate a little bit on the different methodologies that you're bringing into this book?

Lan Li: Mm. Yeah. Um, so, oh gosh, that's a big question. Um. So in my practice, because I was trained in science studies, history and anthro, because I also work as a filmmaker, I'm very visual because I am somewhat of an autodidact where I'm trained as a modernist, but I use classical sources. Some of the sources are in Latin, German, French, Japanese, classical, sinographic, Chinese.

Um, there's an image in [00:33:00] Russian, like I follow these images and I, and every time I encounter, I, I, I have different methods depending on how proficient or improficient I am with the sources. Because I'm dealing with images, I also deal with close reading. I reconstruct, I've reconstructed different kinds of images as I think with them.

Um, I try things out. Even when I was in my postdoc and I was in neuroscience labs, I was sectioning dorsal root ganglia in bats, and that also informed how I was thinking about peripheral sensation and nerves. I was doing epidemiological studies in peripheral neuropathy. That also helped. So I'm really capacious in how I approach both linguistic and material and um, visual philological aspects because this is so broad, like at, at at its heart, this is a, a work of cultural history and I think of myself as a cultural historian, so I have to be capacious, but it is still requires its own kind of rigor, and of course reading secondary sources like reading whatever journal articles I have, doing a little bit of [00:34:00] critical fabulation archive work, material, cultural history.

So the second project will deal more with practice that follows different healers really around different parts of the world and ends with a, um, uh, it ends with in Houston and in Haiti.

So that's what I'm hoping the second project to do.

Mia Levenson: That sounds like you did a lot of improvisation yourself for this book.

Lan Li: Oh, for sure. And then filming and interviewing and like that's all part of the practice.

Mia Levenson: Yeah.

Lan Li: I hope that this is the beginning of a longer conversation. It doesn't, the book doesn't have to be for everybody. Um, and, but I do hope that it at least has a place in a longer conversation. And I think about conversation, not just as a social practice and not as, you know, this performance practice. Or an invitation for improvising to think with, but it is just a drop in the bucket. But if we think about when Expressiveness of the Body [00:35:00] was published in 1999, this book published in 2025. It's, you know, 26 years between these two books. And my book is a direct response to, he says Expressiveness of the Body book, um, where he talks about the divergence, the divergence of Greek and Chinese medicine.

And it's not that I'm talking about convergence, picking up where he left off, both, both kind of topically and temporally. Um, but I'm trying to at least, um play, and I hope that the book has, because maybe I, I hope that the integrity of the book lasts. I really do.

Mia Levenson: Yeah. So for our listeners, I just wanna say Lan, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for joining us. When you're ready to talk about the second book project, we'll be here for your third time on the podcast.

Lan Li: Oh my gosh. People will be like, oh no. Thank you so much. Thank you both so much. This has been And

Richard Del Rio: just reminder to folks, for those who are interested in reading Professor [00:36:00] Lan's book, is free and available to download

Project Muse. Uh, check

Lan Li: Thanks.

Richard Del Rio: check it out.

Mia Levenson: "Body Maps: Improvising Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine" from Johns Hopkins University Press.

Congratulations Lan and thank you for being here.

Lan Li: Thank you.