ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a touchstone for percussion and auscultation (two important diagnostic methods), including more recent contexts for these mainstay medico-sonic bodily assessment tools. Two primary questions in this chapter ask: (1) Historically, how has sound been used in ancient, traditional, and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) health systems? (2) And how does ineffable bodily sound in health and healing use rhetoric? Using pan-historiography, this chapter rhetorically explores likely origins of medico-sonic practices by arguing for the transformation of knowledge about the body's ineffability displayed through onomatopoeia and the use of rhetorical devices, such as simile and metaphor, in ancient health and healing systems in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Greece, and Italy.
