History of beliefs about the human body much on discourse about bodies, rather than on material bodies themselves. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's 1965 "Rabelais and His World", they promoted a more materially orientated direction in the history of the body. The Ebers Papyrus is an Egyptian medical text and is the oldest known record of the human body, dating back to 3000 BC. The Ebers Papyrus describes the body by physical examination and what can be felt. Clinical investigations such as the Pulse, percussion of the body, the recognition of diseased or disordered states. “If thou examinst a swelling of the covering of his belly’s horns above
Traditional Chinese medicines derived from the human body being are no more used medically, it seems rude to list them as drugs." Note the medical terms "dystocia" "A slow or difficult labor or delivery" and "stranguria" (i.e., "strangury" "A painful, frequent need to urinate, when the bladder is largely empty or with little urine production"). Reflecting the well-known Confucianist inhibition against mutilating one's body (Cooper & Sivin 1973: 212), Li Shizhen's preface to chapter 52 ethically condemns the use of some human drugs. The human is a different species from all the other organisms used as sources of drugs. In later times, Taoist alchemists [方伎之士] considered that many