Page from an Edo-Period Chinese medical text
In the Edo period medical text above, the triple burner’s (top left) function was thought to be related to the metabolic functions within the body. If so the invisible processes that transform food into energy are in some ways understood as being related to some sort of heat exchange. However the burner also seems to have been related to certain states of matter such as liquids and gases; “The upper burner acts like a mist. The middle burner acts like foam. The lower burner acts like a swamp.” The triple burner's activities are also related to the regulation of qi, the vital life force or energy that flows through the body along its meridians.
The Triple Burner isn't a physical organ, it is more like a system composed of three cavities, what we would call the chest (lungs and heart). the abdomen (spleen and stomach} and the pelvis (kidneys, bladder, and intestines). The system coordinates metabolism, respiration, digestion and fluid movement and acts like a thermostat to regulate body temperature and qi. It in effect governs the organs that you would find within these three regions, ensuring harmony, controlling stress response (the hormone system) and the body's use of matter states, which are seen as being related to vaporisation (breathing and pumping liquids), foam (digestion and transformation) and swamp (waste management), but which we tend to think of more as metabolic exchanges. Our metabolism refers to the life sustaining series of chemical reactions that constantly go on within our bodies. The conversion of energy in food into a usable form for cellular processes such as proteins or lipids, as well as the excretion of associated waste, are all enzyme catalysed reactions that ensure that we can reproduce, maintain our structural form and respond to our changing environment. I.e. the digestion and transportation of substances into and between different cells. As we get that far down the scale of things, we also get closer and closer to the quantum world, a world of unknowns and energy interconnections that it has been theorised is effected by our emotional condition.
In my own drawings in order to visualise interoceptual experiences or feelings, I have at times invented similar visual forms, sometimes thinking of fire and flames as I tried to envision gas exchange or the need to sweat. I was also thinking of arteries and veins and how they spread heat throughout the body. Gradually my imagery has become a fusion of what I have gathered from medical text books, how I imagine my own internal embodied world and what others have told me about their feelings and private understandings of internal bodily happenings. What we imagine and what we feel something could be like is often quite different to what science tells us something should look like.
The more I look at the visualisation of interoceptual experiences, the more I become aware of the interconnected nature of all the body's systems and that no one aspect can be regarded in isolation from the others. However in medicine we are often treated as if the bit that has gone wrong can be isolated from everything else. This is the difference between a holistic approach to healing and a more symptom-based or reductionist approach, which is most closely associated with conventional medicine. There is in the western medical tradition a focus on a specific symptom, rather than the whole person. Which means that methods like drugs, surgery or radiation are used to address particular problems. This approach which is driven by scientific methods, has of course been spectacularly successful, without penicillin I'm sure I would be dead by now, but we have more recently become aware that we might have neglected to think about how people are also emotional beings who are also shaping themselves and their health in ways that are only now becoming understood in the western world, but which were ways known about for thousands of years in other cultures.
Our bodies have their own immune systems and these are amazing. They have evolved over millions of years to combat infection and disease and they are far more sophisticated than anything yet produced by the pharmaceutical industry. It was therefore really interesting to come across the ”You and Immune System" exhibition that was held in Japan back in 2018. It was created for the brand: Meiji, by the ad agency: Dentsu, who used the illustrator Masanobu Ishii, to develop memorable images from existing electron-microscope information.
In the immune system neutrophil extracellular traps are web-like structures of DNA, histones, and antimicrobial proteins that are released by immune cells called neutrophils to capture and kill pathogens like bacteria, fungi and parasites. They act as a physical barrier to trap microbes and are a fantastic contribution to our wider innate immune response. The illustrator Masanobu Ishii, takes this type of information and then conjures up imaginary encounters between these web-like structures and pathogens, visualising them as if they are encounters between undersea creatures.
The resultant imagery is far more powerful than the original electron micrographs. Masanobu Ishii's drawings have tapped into a world of associations that include science fiction and Manga imagery, so that the cultural distancing of scientific information is closed down and replaced by a graphic style that many Japanese observers would recognise and be familiar with. A door is therefore opened into a complex world that the average person would normally find too difficult to comprehend, but by making an analogy between fighting sea creatures and the microscopic encounters within the body, Ishii has helped to open people's eyes to the issues involved.
The Triple Burner isn't a physical organ, it is more like a system composed of three cavities, what we would call the chest (lungs and heart). the abdomen (spleen and stomach} and the pelvis (kidneys, bladder, and intestines). The system coordinates metabolism, respiration, digestion and fluid movement and acts like a thermostat to regulate body temperature and qi. It in effect governs the organs that you would find within these three regions, ensuring harmony, controlling stress response (the hormone system) and the body's use of matter states, which are seen as being related to vaporisation (breathing and pumping liquids), foam (digestion and transformation) and swamp (waste management), but which we tend to think of more as metabolic exchanges. Our metabolism refers to the life sustaining series of chemical reactions that constantly go on within our bodies. The conversion of energy in food into a usable form for cellular processes such as proteins or lipids, as well as the excretion of associated waste, are all enzyme catalysed reactions that ensure that we can reproduce, maintain our structural form and respond to our changing environment. I.e. the digestion and transportation of substances into and between different cells. As we get that far down the scale of things, we also get closer and closer to the quantum world, a world of unknowns and energy interconnections that it has been theorised is effected by our emotional condition.
In my own drawings in order to visualise interoceptual experiences or feelings, I have at times invented similar visual forms, sometimes thinking of fire and flames as I tried to envision gas exchange or the need to sweat. I was also thinking of arteries and veins and how they spread heat throughout the body. Gradually my imagery has become a fusion of what I have gathered from medical text books, how I imagine my own internal embodied world and what others have told me about their feelings and private understandings of internal bodily happenings. What we imagine and what we feel something could be like is often quite different to what science tells us something should look like.
Man with stomach ache (self portrait) with edges implying gas exchanges
The more I look at the visualisation of interoceptual experiences, the more I become aware of the interconnected nature of all the body's systems and that no one aspect can be regarded in isolation from the others. However in medicine we are often treated as if the bit that has gone wrong can be isolated from everything else. This is the difference between a holistic approach to healing and a more symptom-based or reductionist approach, which is most closely associated with conventional medicine. There is in the western medical tradition a focus on a specific symptom, rather than the whole person. Which means that methods like drugs, surgery or radiation are used to address particular problems. This approach which is driven by scientific methods, has of course been spectacularly successful, without penicillin I'm sure I would be dead by now, but we have more recently become aware that we might have neglected to think about how people are also emotional beings who are also shaping themselves and their health in ways that are only now becoming understood in the western world, but which were ways known about for thousands of years in other cultures.
Our bodies have their own immune systems and these are amazing. They have evolved over millions of years to combat infection and disease and they are far more sophisticated than anything yet produced by the pharmaceutical industry. It was therefore really interesting to come across the ”You and Immune System" exhibition that was held in Japan back in 2018. It was created for the brand: Meiji, by the ad agency: Dentsu, who used the illustrator Masanobu Ishii, to develop memorable images from existing electron-microscope information.
Electron micrograph of neutrophil extracellular traps and some trapped shigella bacteria
In the immune system neutrophil extracellular traps are web-like structures of DNA, histones, and antimicrobial proteins that are released by immune cells called neutrophils to capture and kill pathogens like bacteria, fungi and parasites. They act as a physical barrier to trap microbes and are a fantastic contribution to our wider innate immune response. The illustrator Masanobu Ishii, takes this type of information and then conjures up imaginary encounters between these web-like structures and pathogens, visualising them as if they are encounters between undersea creatures.
Ishii's images exhibited in public spaces
Just as the Edo period medical imagery helped people at the time to envisage a world within themselves, a contemporary advertising agency has achieved a similar result, this time to alert the public of the importance of work done by a pharmaceutical company. You might feel that this work has therefore a suspect motive behind it, but sometimes it is only by tapping into the rich resources of the industrial world, that this type of communication can be achieved within public spaces outside of the fine art gallery system.
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