Liver qi constraint is one of the most commonly diagnosed pattern of disease in contemporary Chinese medicine. Although the diagnosis is made in all kinds of contexts ranging from physical disorders of the liver organ to menstrual irregularity, it is most commonly invoked when there is an emotional component like tension, stress or depression. Other East Asian medical traditions, which draw from the same sources, also recognise a close connection between emotional disorders and qi constraint but do not necessarily connect this to the Liver. My research project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, employed a transnational approach to explore different conjunctures between constraint as a concept available in the shared archive of East Asian medicines and distinctly local modes of thinking, experiencing, recognising and treating its corporeal presence.

In late imperial China, for instance, the concept of Liver qi constraint medicalised frustrations experienced by both men and women in social contexts that allowed new modes of imagining oneself but simultaneously closed opportunities for living who one desired to be.  In modern China, instead, Liver constraint became a tool for aligning the body of Chinese medicine with that of Western medicine. Equating Chinese concepts of Liver function with those of the nervous system allowed Chinese physicians to translate the then common problem of neurasthenia or "weak nerves" into existing conceptions of Liver qi constraint. When psychiatrists abandoned the diagnosis of neurasthenia in favour of depression Chinese physicians kept the association with qi constraint but dropped that between the Liver and the nerves.

In modern Korea, meanwhile, the notion of constraint was differently translated into the idiom of hwabyŏng or "fire illness." Defined by symptoms such as anxiety, expressions of hatred, shame, paranoia or irritability that arise in response to distinctly Korean problems of living, hwabyŏng is defined as a so-called culture bound syndrome but treated by Korean doctors of Oriental medicine with herbal formulas composed in Song Dynasty China. In Japan, likewise, concepts of qi constraint assimilated from Chinese medical sources were transformed during the late nineteenth century by the idiosyncratic thought styles of individual physicians, the vagaries of Japanese translations of Chinese terms and the specific socio- cultural contexts in which such production occurred. Today they are seen as part of Kampo, a uniquely Japanese way of practicing a medicine originally imported from China. 

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The outputs of the project were published in a special issue of the journal Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry. You also download my Introduction and my paper Constraint as a Window on Emotion-Related Disorders in East Asian Medicines.