Invisible Anatomy in Global Chinese Medicine

How do we see invisible anatomy? This talk is based on Dr. Lan Li's book, , which offers a long global history of medicine through hand-drawn body maps and spans across the tenth to the twentieth centuries. This talk will focus on the graphic form of a tu 圖 as a historical category of technical images to understand how illustrations of lines guided diagnostic and therapeutic practice. Scholars often debated whether to discursively interpret these lines as meridians, channels, or tracts; practitioners often debated whether these lines merely visualized nerves to articulate needling and heating practices. Specifically, this talk offers a critical examination of a thirteenth-century image of jingluo 經絡, or meridians, and considers it within the epistemological frameworks of global East Asian medicine. Drawing on analytical approaches from science studies, visual culture, and medical humanities, it traces the aesthetic, conceptual, and political dimensions of these anatomical images across premodern, modern, and contemporary periods.

Lan A. Li is a historian of the body and filmmaker specializing in medicine and health in global East Asia. She is the author of Body Maps: Improvising Meridians and Nerves in Global Chinese Medicine (JHU Press 2025). After receiving her Ph.D. in History, Anthropology, and Science Technology and Society Studies from MIT, Li served as a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at Columbia University and joined the medical humanities program and history faculty at Rice University. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, with joint appointments in the East Asian Studies Program and Department of History of Science and Technology. Li's film and media work has fostered collaborations with medical practitioners across Shanghai, Mumbai, São Paulo, New York, Boston, Houston, and Baltimore. She produces podcasts and curates exhibitions exploring acupuncture, Buddhist medicine, and metaphors in science and medicine.

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Host or Publisher Center for East Asian Studies