What if the greatest contribution of Chinese medicine to life and living in the present lies not in its therapeutic arsenal, but in its power to change how we think about ourselves and the world around us? Or rather, if whatever therapeutic powers it may hold may be inseparable from such “thinking with” Chinese medicine? This presentation is a first foray into a new research project that hopes to explore these questions. To this end, I begin by differentiating “thinking with” from “thinking about.” I argue that much of our engagement with Chinese medicine reflects “thinking about,” by which I mean mostly attempts at translating it into idioms, theories, and practices with which we feel more comfortable to “think with.” I also note that philosophers and sinologists who are serious about “thinking with” China tend to leave Chinese medicine out of this project. The remainder of the presentation explores what happens if we allow Chinese medicine back in. After all, Chinese thinkers throughout the ages have always “thought with” medicine. I employ the emergent interface between cognitive science and Neo-Confucianism to explore the potential of this approach. It leads me to argue, on the one hand, that we may want to explore the groundings of Neo-Confucian conceptions of virtue in biology, that is, as “bio-virtues;” on the other, it extends treatment options aimed at the heart-mind (xin 心) in Chinese medicine clinical practice.
Prof. Volker Scheid PhD, FRCHM, FBAcC is an internationally known practitioner, teacher, and scholar of Chinese medicine. He was Director of EASTmedicine at the University of Westminster, a trans-disciplinary research centre for the study of East Asian medicines, from 2004 to 2018, and is now a Visiting Researcher at the China Centre, University of Kiel. His latest book, Searching for the Dao of Medicine: Landscapes of Thoughtful Practice in Late Imperial Study (Berghahn 2026), explores different pathways to clinical virtuosity proposed by physicians and medical writers in China between the fourteenth century and the present.
