This talk compares classical Greek and early Chinese medical advice on how one should live to avoid sickness and improve one’s condition, the traditions that were retrospectively labelled as diaitētikē and yang sheng by later ancient medical writers. Dr Harris’s initial discussion draws primarily on the Hippocratic Regimen in Health and Regimen and manuscripts from Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan, situating their contents in broader social and intellectual contexts. The comparison then proceeds at three levels. First, at the level of technique, there are both similarities and differences between the kinds of lifestyles and activities recommended in each case. Secondly, at the level of theory, the Hippocratic texts give central roles to the patient’s individual constitution and compensatory balancing between contraries. In early China, while notions of balancing contraries played a role in some medical contexts, the dominant physiological rationale for breath and daoyin exercises was to replenish the body’s supply of qi and accumulate jing. Thirdly, at the level of value, Chinese regimen aimed at the long life widely celebrated in early Chinese literature. Hippocratic texts offer not longevity but health, the greatest of all (external) goods, and seem to share the ambivalence about old age attested in other genres of early Greek literature. Even where simple generalisations are out of the question, this talk shows how comparative approach to early Chinese medicine enables us to see what is common with other traditions and throws into relief what is distinctive and open to further investigation.

Arthur Harris is Lloyd-Dan David Research Fellow at the Needham Research Institute and Darwin College, Cambridge. He read Classics at Oxford and took an MPhil and PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge, first focussing on ancient Greek mechanics and medicine and then learning Classical Chinese to take a comparative perspective on ancient science. He has also completed a part-time BSc in Mathematics at the Open University. He has finished his first book manuscript, Aristotle and the Mechanica, and is writing a second book on medicine in early Greece and China.