The concept ‘Knowing hands’ captures how pre-modern people used their hands to think through things, such as macro-microcosm relationships, and to think with, as in cognitive processing. It also captures hand-based interventions. In medical care, these include pulse taking, needling, massage, and ritual healing as these methods also required one’s mind to be at one’s fingertips. This research lecture will cover the two dimensions of what is meant by ‘knowing hands’ specified in the subtitle; namely, 1) hand-memory techniques – how humans use hands to aid their cognitive processing – and 2) handy knowledge – what knowledge is grasped corporeally and conceptually with hands and so considered ‘handy’ enough to be embodied. To illustrate this two-part distinction between ‘knowing hands’, this lecture uses a range of examples from daily-use encyclopedias published during the Ming dynasty. These examples differ from the kind of hand-memory techniques and handy knowledge written about and illustrated in other types of sources in the previous Tang-Song period.

This lecture will first lay out an approach to how to read for the history of ‘knowing hands’ in Chinese culture. It will then introduce the earliest examples of hand-memory techniques from the Tang-Song period. Then it will focus on the Ming-era daily-use encyclopedias as providing a new lens into wider uses of ‘knowing hands’. Hand-based knowledge became new significantly in these encyclopedias. Everyday knowledge included how to use one’s hands to make calculations and do divinations as well as to learn, for example, how to play music, do martial arts, and use a bow and arrow. This lecture both introduces the new Knowing Hands project Dr Hanson runs with anthropologist Dr Stéphanie Homola (CNRS, Paris) and encourages others to consider integrating the history of hands into their research in other dimensions of the Chinese history of science, technology, and medicine.

Marta Hanson publishes widely on the history of medicine in China, early modern Sino-European medical exchanges, and public health in East Asia. She has a PhD from the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania. She was Assistant Professor of late imperial Chinese history at UCSD (1997-2004) and then Associate Professor of East Asian medical history at Johns Hopkins University (2004-2021). She is currently the German PI, with Stéphanie Homola as the French PI, for an ANR-DFG funded three-year project 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 (Routledge, 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). As part of the ‘Knowing Hands’ project, her current book manuscript, Grasping Heaven and Earth: The Mind in Hand in Chinese Medicine, examines how Chinese healers used their hands to think with, prognosticate, and heal.