Interested in collaborations on a multidisciplinary project on multispecies and multi-life humanities? Please reach out to the Center for Integrated Japanese Studies (CIJS) at Tohoku University by email, where we have only recently launched such an initiative! Plant Knowledge in the Shadow of War Whereas others saw death in the carnage of World War I,…
Tag: medical knowledge
Some Are for the Poor and the Boor: The Hierarchy and Hierarchization of Materia Medica
All plant life are not made equal—at least not in the eyes of Japanese physcians during the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). This essay explores what was at stake when some plants were regarded as respectable medicinal herbs while others were dismissed as weeds for the poor.
Rationed Knowledge: Culture Films and Nutritional Propaganda in Wartime Japan
How was nutritional knowledge popularized on big screens in wartime Japan?
“They Are No Respectors of Identity”: Medical Cadaver Dissection, Power, and Inequality in the United States
John A. Carranza // Western biomedical education has relied on the dissection of human bodies to learn of the intricate processes that make us function. Galen and Andreas Vesalius provided the foundation for examining the body in medical education, and the practice has persisted to today despite the increasing use of technology to replace human…
Review-Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital, by David Oshinsky
John A. Carranza Nothing is as important in American culture as the place of the hospital. Hospitals are spaces that we inhabit when we are at our most vulnerable and want to be healed. They are spaces where scientific knowledge manifests and intricate power relations occur. Perhaps this is why hospitals have been the…