Today’s short talk will introduce you to the world of traditional Chinese medicine and gynecology from a completely different angle than you probably ever considered before. Rather than offering you clear-cut and simple answers to the questions above, which would be impossible anyway whether we had an hour or a full week, we will merely begin to explore these thorny issues together. Come prepared with an open mind and a willingness to take a critical look at your own assumptions related to gynecology, by means of writings from a completely different time and culture.
- What could an old hermit, busy picking mushrooms in the company of a tiger and dragon in the seventh century, possibly have to teach the modern practitioner on how to treat women’s bodies in the 21st century?
- How can we even know what he thought about female bodies, what associations he had with things like menstruation, growing bellies in pregnancy, or infertility?
- Why and how did male literate physicians/authors even begin to consider women in their writing and from what angles?
- What, if any, were the clinical ramifications of these theories on women’s lived experiences?
- And ultimately, to paraphrase a question by Yaron Seidman, if Sun Simiao was a true Daoist hermit, why did he write all this information down rather than disappear into the sunset like his predecessor Laozi?
