The human body has been subject of much debate. How people are defined, and what defined them – be it their anatomy or their energy or both – depends on culture and time. Culture not only defines how sex is perceived but also how gender is defined. Today gender, sex, and identity continue to be of much debate and change based on what place and people are being examined. The early modern idea of the body was a cultural ideal, an understanding and approach to how the body works and what place that body has in the world. All cultural ideals of the body in the early modern period deal with deficiencies and disorders within a body, commonly told through a male ideal. Ideas of the body in the early modern period form the history of how bodies should be and how to correct the body when something has gone wrong. Therefore, early modern conceptions of the body were not biological as there was not a restrictive biological view of the human body as established by modern science. Conceptions of the body are primarily either eastern, based in China and involving practices such as Traditional chinese medicine, or western, which follows the Greek traditions of science and is more closely related to modern science despite original anatomists and ideas of the body being just as unscientific as Chinese practices. Historiography In Western historical research, scholars began investigating the cultural history of the human body in detail in the 1980s. The movement is particularly associated with the historian of medicine Roy Porter, whose 1991 article 'History of the Body' was a seminal study. 1995 saw the foundation of the journal Body and Society, by which time the field of the history of the body was already extensive and diverse. Porter pointed out that Western historiography had previously assumed mind–body dualism (i.e. that the body is fundamentally separate from the mind or soul) and therefore that the cultural history of bodies as material objects had been overlooked: 'given the abundance of evidence available, we remain remarkably ignorant about how individuals and social groups have experienced, controlled, and projected their embodied selves. How have people made sense of the mysterious link between "self" and its extensions? How have they managed the body as an intermediary between self and society?' He emphasised that the history of the body is important to understanding histories of