“Healing, Entertaining, and Accumulating Merit: The Circulation of Medical Recipes from the Late Ming through the Qing,” Frontiers of History in China 14.1 (2019): 109-136. (original) (raw)
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By examining the dynamic interplay between discourses of fiction and medicine, Novel Medicine demonstrates how fiction incorporated, created, and disseminated medical knowledge in China, beginning in the sixteenth century. Critical readings of fictional and medical texts provide a counterpoint to prevailing narratives that focus only on the "literati" aspects of the novel, showing that these texts were not merely read, but were used by a wide variety of readers for a range of purposes. The intersection of knowledge-fictional and real, elite and vernacular-illuminates the history of reading and daily life and challenges us to rethink the nature of Chinese literature.
Monumenta Serica, 2018
In 1759, Zhao Xuemin 趙學敏, a scholar and physician from Qiantang County (present-day Hangzhou), compiled his Chuanya 串雅. Based on certain editions of this work, modern scholars have assumed that this text is composed of recipes collected from itinerant healers, and that it was its author’s intention to transmit folk healing practices through the printed word. The original manuscript that Zhao Xuemin compiled probably never reached print, however, whereas the extant editions of this text found numerous new editions and re-printings. Focusing on several manuscripts and printed editions of the Chuanya which emerged between the late Qing and Republican period, this article traces the processes through which various different agents created and recreated the Chuanya. In contrast to past studies where the connection between the Chuanya and popular healing is taken for granted, I argue that any conclusion should primarily take into account the various editions of this work. By the case study of this text, I hope to clarify a broader dimension around the authorship of printed medical books in late imperial China and challenge the assumption that we can understand them outside the context of their edition and publication.
Medical instruction and popularization in Ming-Qing China
Qiu Xiaomei, a prominent woman doctor born to a modest family in Hangzhou in 1911, started to study Chinese medicine under a master when she was eighteen. Before the master decided whether or not to take her as a pupil, she was questioned on the content of four books given to her three months earlier. These four books were: Yixue xinwu (Mental comprehension of medical learning, 1732), Binhu siyan maijue (Four-character verses on vessels and pulse by Li Shizhen, 1564), Yaoxing zongfu (Verses on the general nature of drugs, fifteenth century), and Tangtou gejue (Recipes in rhymes, 1694). 2 These works were four of the most common medical introductory texts of the Ming-Qing period, spannig from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. They tell us much about the way in which beginners were initiated in medicine, and reveal the principal historical period when such literature matured.
In the last two decades, historians have studied critical social and cultural changes of the late Ming, from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, focusing on the flourishing of print culture, the emergence of women writers, and the increasing importance of material culture in defining the lifestyle of literati . Chen Hsiu-fen's book contributes to the field by adding a new dimension: the dramatic changes in the production and circulation of ideas about nourishing life. These changes were especially remarkable in literati writings, commercially printed handbooks, and encyclopedias. "Nourishing life," in Chinese yangsheng, was one of the many terms used by literati and commercial publishers who wrote, compiled, and published on subjects like diet, sex, gymnastics, and other daily practices. Chen uses the term "nourishing life" as an analytic category representing a series of body-centered concerns and practices. She analyzes a wide range of writings with special attention to their underlying concerns about taste, the manner of possessing artifacts, and the commercial values of the knowledge of bodily practices.
Healing the Jesuit Body: Sharing Medical Knowledge in 17 th – Century China
Amèlia Polònia, Fabiano Bracht, Gisele C. Conceiçao eds., Connecting Worlds: production and circulation of knowledge in the first Global Age, 2018
In the 17 th-century, Jesuit missionaries in China tailored their pursuit of indigenous medical knowledge according to the scope of their enterprise. They used their curative knowledge and nursing skills to preserve their health, to convert the indigenous ill to Catholicism, and to secure financial gains to support their evangelizing endeavours. At the same time, they translated traditional Chinese medical treatises in order to disseminate this novel knowledge to Europe. This paper examines the processes of translating and the mechanism of sharing medical knowledge among the Jesuit missionaries in China by focusing on recently discovered manuscripts of Father François de Rougemont (1624-1676). His Breve compendio de varias receitas de medicina, a collection of recipes and medical notes compiled from numerous printed and handwritten sources from Europe and Asia, was meant for personal use in the mission field. Handwritten fragments in Latin describing the Chinese pulse diagnosis method provide evidence of his direct involvement in efforts to convey Chinese medical knowledge to European audiences. 1
2005
In recent decades various versions of Chinese medicine have begun to be widely practised in western countries, and the academic study of the subject is now well established. However, there are still few scholarly monographs that describe the history of Chinese medicine and there are none at all on the medieval period. The collection presented here is an example of the kind of international collaboration of research teams, centres and individuals that is required to begin to study the source materials adequately. The primary sources for this research come from a collection of medieval manuscripts discovered in 1900 in a walled-up room in the Buddhist caveshrines of Dunhuang, Gansu Province, west China. Dunhuang was formerly an important Silk Road town, and formed the base of one of the first garrisons to be established during the Han period to secure the safe passage of soldiers, officials and traders between east and west. While the majority of the manuscripts stored in the cave are copies of Buddhist scriptural texts, there are also thousands of non-Buddhist texts, both religious and secular. The presence among these of some one hundred medical texts suggests that the Dunhuang prefectural school was a centre for copying and transmitting medical writings. In the collection we find the earliest handwritten copies of well-known classical medical treatises, together with hitherto unknown medical works, including illustrations and charts, texts related to religious and popular healing traditions and, excitingly, extensive portions of texts previously known only through brief quotations in later works. This is the first book to discuss this fascinating material in a Western language in the century since the Dunhuang library was discovered, and it is likely to remain the only book of its kind in English for a considerable time.
Body, texts and things, not necessarily in this order, are basic themes which medical historians encounter every day. However, re-assessing these familiar themes with new concepts, sometimes from other disciplines, can shed light onto overlooked or forgotten aspects of them. For example, there are various things stored in the utility room of medical historydrugs and the materials used to produce them; the medical apparatus; even medical books and manuscripts per se; and the human body. Studies of "material culture" keep our eyes from being blindfolded by the material and symbolic surface, and maintain our focus on exploring the meanings things hold for people. This statement can also be applicable to the concept of "bodily practice", which encourages us not to limit our thinking about the body merely to anatomy or a functional organism, but rather examine the body as a cultural construction and a site for interactive agency. However, for most historians, the medical text is the medium, and sometimes obstacle, to understanding things and the body in the past. How do we determine the meaning of a medical text? Benefitting from philosophy, anthropology, linguistics and literary criticism, we have started to explore how texts and their meanings are related to authors, audiences and contexts. This workshop would like to raise two questions: first, what kind of insights will be sparked off by the encounter of these approaches and the field of Chinese medical history? Second, can we provide a reflective perspective on concepts by negotiating them one to another?