Elaborate Mapping of the Body

Today I learned about circulation.

Valencius, Conevery Bolton. 2002. The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land. New York: Perseus Books.

In the middle of the 19th century, movement between body parts - often without making explicit exactly what was moving - was of great concern. As the responsibility of health care was changing locations from the household to the hospital, notions of how the inside of the body functioned was also changing. The mid 19th century, however, was still before the professionalizaiton and scientization of medicine, still before germ theory, and still before the probing of the stethoscope and surgery. Valencius points out that Americans on the frontier in this period "inhabited not simply the geographic surroundings we might easily, and wrongly, identify as the sum of their environment; they lived also in a complicated interior geography of sensation, movement, and flow...understanding their bodies, their inhabited and hidden selves, is a central task of understanding their more accessible, visible world of stream, swamp, mountain, and pasture" (p. 53).

Following the movement of disease and sensation through the body, and the fact that this was the most trustworthy means of diagnosis, means that people had an awareness of their bodies and a way to express physical sensation. This means that place names must have matched up with an internal geography. "Many ailments assailed specific body parts or locations, which were identified by an elaborate mapping of the body." Knowing how diseases traveled through the body's interior geography was integral to a healing process that relied on balance, the removal of congestion, and the increase of flow.