New Scanner New Drawing for Babinski's and Other Signs of the Foot

We just installed a new scanner/printer and here is my first scan of a new drawing. The drawing has the cryptic title, "Babinski’s and Other Signs of the Feet". The title was derived from a medical textbook chapter on how to read reflexes. (Babinski’s sign is an aberrant reflex in the foot.) This illustration is part of my ongoing research on ways to overlay medicine, literature and art.

In neurology, certain brain and nerve lesions can be located by how they cause reflexes in distant parts of the body. Like many diagnostic techniques, there is part art, part science to it. With advanced technology, however, it might be easier to just stick a body in a tube and scan it. But might reliance on technology eventually cause a loss in human skills and observations? This occurred to me after I happened across Babinski’s Sign in the chapter on reflexes and realized that a practitioner I had seen some months before had not done this reflex test as instructed in the text. The instructions clearly called for drawing a stick or pen from the heel upwards to the ball of the foot following a line near the side of the foot, then across the ball of the foot - like drawing an upside down capital "L." The practitioner just drew a straight line up the center of the foot. I subsequently noticed some other medical practitioners doing the same thing. I cannot know if this makes a difference or not but I found it interesting that a few steps were left out and wondered if depending upon machine technology made learning these manual techniques a simplified, perfunctory routine.

The art overlay in this illustration relies on my knowledge of Chinese seal script. In ancient China, shamans carved this somewhat pictographic written language on to stone seals in order to work their magic. It was believed that what was written, if written in this certain ancient way, could evoke desired changes in the natural world. One example of this was a stone seal inscribed with the words "keep going forward." Legend has it that this stone seal was pressed in to a wet footprint of a tiger, should one come across it in the wild. This would encourage the tiger to continue on his way and not come back to devour the wanderer in the woods.

Wondering what that print within a footprint would look like and not having any tigers on hand, I decided to use my own footprint. Since this would be a detailed pencil drawing, I decided to use liquid graphite mixed with ink for the printed seals and foot. That stuff was a bit too tacky on the bottom of my foot and dried out rather quickly but I was able to obtain a print.

The print in the center of the foot reads "Eternal Joy," not a bad wish. On the heel the square seal reads "Health," although I mistakenly printed it upside down. No worries here. I am not superstitious. Floating out to the right side of the footprint is a seal that reads "Spiritual Resonance."

The art of reading reflexes has not been entirely erased. Fortunately, in 2009, zhuan seal script was declared a UNESCO world heritage art form in need of cultural preservation. So this art form hopefully won’t completely die out either.

http://en.chinaculture.org/2014-12/09/content_584312.htm

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519009/