" Ten Times More Difficult to Treat": Female Bodies in Medical Texts from Early Imperial China (original) (raw)

Han China, investigating medical theories and practices as reflected in the applied medical literature of "prescriptions for women." Between the Han and Song periods, this paper argues, the negative association of the female body with the vague category of pathologies "below the girdle," referring most notably to conditions of vaginal discharge, was replaced with a more positive focus on menstruation, which symbolized regular and predictable cycles of generativity and free flow. As male physicians came to recognize the female body as gendered and accepted the need for a specialized treatment of women, menstruation became the window through which they gained access to the hidden processes inside the female body. By "balancing/regulating the menses," they learned to treat and prevent such dreaded chronic conditions as infertility, susceptibility to cold, or general emaciation and weakness, all which were seen as related to the female reproductive processes. Thus, the practice of menstrual regulation ultimately served to ensure female fertility and the continuation of the family line. androgynous view of the human body was elaborated most succinctly in theoretical medical classics like the Huangdi neijing 黃帝內經 (Inner classic of the Yellow Emperor). The tight correlations and parallel functioning of human, cosmic, and political bodies in the theory of systematic correspondences from the Han dynasty on offered, in the abstractions of yin and yang, an evocative metaphor from which to interpret the difference between the sexes. Challenging the gender-neutral view of the human body in the early classics, already in the seventh century, Sun Simiao (孫思邈 581?-682) wrote in a famous collection of prescriptions that "women's disorders are ten times more difficult to treat than men's." 6 In the two main sections of this article, I will compare and contrast the early Han theoretical model of androgyny with a clinically applied discourse on what the authors saw as the lived experience of the female body as it emerged over the following centuries in a technical literature of "prescriptions for women." First, I will analyze the development of female pathology, as it is reflected in the categorizations and etiological interpretations of women's conditions. Second, I will look more closely at the origin of ideas about female Blood 7 and menstruation.