08.05.2025

David Luesink: Chinese Students in the Dissection Room: Locating Anatomical Knowledge

Tuesday, May 20, 2025, 16-18 pm, Seminarraum, China Centrum Tübingen(CCT), Hintere Grabenstr. 26, 72070 Tübingen

This talk is based on a chapter of a larger book, “The Body Anatomic and the Body Politic in Modern China,” about the institutionalization of anatomy as the basis for a powerful new form of medicine in China rooted in a relationship between state power and a regulated and standardized medical profession. Following a chapter describing the efforts to establish an anatomy law in the new Republic of China after 1912, this chapter argues that the body anatomic would be constructed first in the dissection room. The dissection room was a brand-new kind of space that had never existed in China. In this space young women and men in a medical program would as a matter of course encounter the bodies of the dead. A new type of relationship between the living student and the corpse of the dead anatomy subjects would be formed in the dissection room where a student would have to come to terms with feelings of fear, disgust, and empathy as day after day they would plunge their scalpel through skin and bone and tissue uncovering the secrets that the dead could tell the living about normal and pathological anatomy. Chinese medical students encountering the bodies of the dead for the first time left behind traces of this encounter that are explored in this chapter through first person narratives, poetry, and photographs. The chapter will focus on three personal accounts of student dissection, each remarkable as dissection writing and each revealing the preoccupations of Chinese anatomy students engaged in cutting up a dead body for the first time.

David Luesink is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, U.S.A. He is a historian of modern China with interests in the history of medicine, public health, and science. He has published articles on medicine and anatomy in China, edited a volume called China and the Globalization of Biomedicine (2019), and is completing a book manuscript on the history of anatomy in China that explores how new knowledge of the human body was connected to technologies of state making. Other ongoing research projects explore China’s first scientific laboratory and its research on plague, and a book on the significance of the standardization of scientific terminology for medical and scientific professionalization in China and the imbrication of these professions in state power.