Curved Spine: The Shape of Spine in Taoist Body Diagrams and Its Influence on Medical Body Diagrams

Abstract

From the early Taoist diagrams of the human body to the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, Taoists exaggerated and deformed the human spine in a shape-shifting manner. It is likely that medical practitioners were influenced by this style of representation, and there are also numerous diagrams of the human body with the curved spine in the lateral-view diagrams of viscera and Ming Tang Tu (明堂图), which always show the human torso in an elliptical "egg shape". No later than the Ming dynasty, medical practitioners began to depict the actual physiological spinal curve of the human body. By the Qing dynasty, the depiction of the spinal curve in medical diagrams of the human figure showed a tendency to part ways with the Taoist freehand style of the previous generation. Although the representation of the curve of the spine was very crude, later medical images of the human body at least gradually straightened the spine and no longer depicted it in a shape-shifting manner. However, the curved spine in Taoist diagrams of the human body continued to exist, and the presentation of the curved spine never changed. This way of depicting its appearance, which is very different from reality, is shaped by Taoism's special way of perceiving and viewing the body, and may also contain another form of truth.