---
title: "History of beliefs about the human body"
chunk: 1/3
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_beliefs_about_the_human_body"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:11:20.435646+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

The human body has been subject of much debate. How people are defined, and what defined them – be it their anatomy or their energy or both – depends on culture and time. Culture not only defines how sex is perceived but also how gender is defined.  Today gender, sex, and identity continue to be of much debate and change based on what place and people are being examined.
The early modern idea of the body was a cultural ideal, an understanding and approach to how the body works and what place that body has in the world.  All cultural ideals of the body in the early modern period deal with deficiencies and disorders within a body, commonly told through a male ideal.  Ideas of the body in the early modern period form the history of how bodies should be and how to correct the body when something has gone wrong.  Therefore, early modern conceptions of the body were not biological as there was not a restrictive biological view of the human body as established by modern science.
Conceptions of the body are primarily either eastern, based in China and involving practices such as Traditional chinese medicine, or western, which follows the Greek traditions of science and is more closely related to modern science despite original anatomists and ideas of the body being just as unscientific as Chinese practices.

== Historiography ==

In Western historical research, scholars began investigating the cultural history of the human body in detail in the 1980s. The movement is particularly associated with the historian of medicine Roy Porter, whose 1991 article 'History of the Body' was a seminal study. 1995 saw the foundation of the journal Body and Society, by which time the field of the history of the body was already extensive and diverse.
Porter pointed out that Western historiography had previously assumed mind–body dualism (i.e. that the body is fundamentally separate from the mind or soul) and therefore that the cultural history of bodies as material objects had been overlooked: 'given the abundance of evidence available, we remain remarkably ignorant about how individuals and social groups have experienced, controlled, and projected their embodied selves. How have people made sense of the mysterious link between "self" and its extensions? How have they managed the body as an intermediary between self and society?' He emphasised that the history of the body is important to understanding histories of coercion and control, sex and gender, and other important but culturally varied aspects of human experience.
Another prominent voice in the field at the same time was Caroline Walker Bynum, whose 1988 Holy Feast and Holy Fast became a landmark study. Both Bynum and Porter noted that during the 1980s Western history of the body research drew on post-structuralist thought, such as Michel Foucault's ideas of biopolitics and biopower, which emphasised that state power is not abstract, but exercised through and over human bodies. But both expressed a concern that research was focusing too 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.
Another seminal study around the same time was Thomas Laqueur's 1990 Making Sex: Body and Gender from Greeks to Freud, which explored the social importance of different conceptions of the sexed body over time.

== Ebers Papyrus ==

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 his pudenda (sex organs) then thou shalt place thy finger on it and examine his belly and knock on the fingers (percuss) if thou examinst his that has come out and has arisen by his cough. Then thou shalt say concerning it: it is a swelling of the covering of his belly. It is a disease which I will treat”.
The distinct medical tone focuses on what can be felt externally to infer the maladies of the body. The body was born in the correct state but could was fallible and  fixable with the correct intervention and feeling and using the senses to identify what has gone wrong. The Ebers Papyrus refers to many god-like and spiritual infestations of the body that could not be explained at the time. Despite the explanations for maladies by spiritual rational, the interventions described to investigate and see the body were distinctly disconnected for the spirit or life force of the body and was principally about what could be seen or touched.
Descriptions of the exact placement of the heart within the body, the circulation of blood are in no doubt accurate as Egyptians practiced embalming their dead by removal of organs and placement of them in jars.

== Medical Body in Ancient Greece ==