10.06.2026

Lecture: Marta Hanson, "Hand as Diagram: Ritual Healing and Prognosticating in Medieval Chinese Medicine"

On Tue, 16 Jun 2026, Prof. Hanson will deliver a lecture on Chinese Medicine

Prof. Dr. Marta Hanson (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg), “Hand as Diagram: Ritual Healing and Prognosticating in Medieval Chinese Medicine”

Abstract When Chinese physicians used their hands in healing rituals, to memorize concepts, to calculate time, and to prognosticate, they deployed their hand as a diagram. Comparable to an excel spreadsheet, the phalangeal divisions of the fingers could pragmatically function for tabulating knowledge. When paper was scarce, expensive, or simply impractical, people could use their hands to exorcize, memorize, recollect, think with, and prognosticate. The earliest extant evidence of using the “hand as diagram” in China is in ritual healing practices documented in the 7th-century medical text Appended Formulas Worth A Thousand Gold (Qianjin yifang, ca. 650s). By the end of the 11th century, two new types of hand-memory and calculation techniques related to Chinese cosmology were recorded in a medical text presented to the Song emperor in 1099. By the early 12th century, the earlier hand-based ritual healing practices were included with further explanation in a major compilation of the Northern Song imperial court (Shengji zonglu, 1117) as well as in an 1152 Buddhist text preserved in the Buddhist Taisho-period Tripitaka (1912-1926). This paper uses these four examples of the hand as diagram from healing rituals to prognostication to illustrate how such visual tu became physically embodied templates of action.

Bio Marta Hanson publishes on the history of medicine in China, early modern Sino-European medical exchanges, and public health in East Asia. Her PhD is in the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania. She was Assistant Professor of late imperial Chinese history at UCSD (1997-2004), then Associate Professor of East Asian medical history at Johns Hopkins University (2004-2021), and is currently the German PI, with Stéphanie Homola as the French PI, for a three-year project funded by the French ANR and DFG on “Knowing Hands: Chinese Hand-memory techniques and handy knowledge in situ, comparison, and contact” (2025-2028). Her book is Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China (2011). She was senior co-editor of Asian Medicine: Tradition and Modernity (2011-2016), President of the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (2015-2019), and is currently Vice President of the International Society for the Critical Study of Divination (2023-present).

Tuesday, 16 Jun 2026, 16:00
Wilhelmstr. 133, Raum 30
Online Zoom Meeting ID: 936 0056 4476 Passcode: 928919