Date: 20 January 2010
Time: 4:00 - 5:00pm
Venue: Room 150, Main Building, The University of Hong Kong

New Media and the Changing Horizons of Medical History: Using the Language of the Future Present to Reconceive the Distant Past by Prof Shigehisa Kuriyama (Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History at Harvard University)

Abstract:
This lecture will illustrate how new tools of electronic media allow us to envision the history of the body with fresh eyes. Using these tools, Prof Kuriyama will show how the shape of medical history is actually quite different from what is commonly supposed, and urge that the key puzzle about Western and Chinese medicine concerns not why they are so different, but on the contrary why, in modern times, they became strangely similar.

About the Speaker:
Shigehisa Kuriyama, Reischauer Institute Professor of Cultural History at Harvard University, studied for two years at Phillips Exeter Academy and two years in France before attending Harvard College. After obtaining his A.B., he trained as an acupuncturist for three years in Tokyo, and returned to Harvard where he received a Ph.D. in History of Science in 1986. His professional appointments (the Humanities Program at the University of New Hampshire; the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University; and the International Research Center for Japanese Studies) prior to joining the Harvard faculty in 2005 have been notable for their explicit emphasis on interdisciplinary inquiry. His publications, for their part, have been marked by a consistent effort to probe broad philosophical issues through the prism of specific topics in comparative cultural history. He has also long been interested in techniques and styles of presenting knowledge. Professor Kuriyama’s The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (1999) received the William H. Welch Medal of the American Association for the History of Medicine, and has been translated into Greek, Chinese and Spanish.

(Co-sponsored by the Faculty of Arts (HKU) under the China-West Studies Research Theme Initiative)

For further information about the Hong Kong Forum, please contact:
Prof Angela K Leung or Dr Robert Peckham.