Download PDF | Miranda Brown - The Art of Medicine in Early China_ The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive-Cambridge University Press (2015).
256 Pages
THE ART OF MEDICINE IN EARLY CHINA
In this book, Miranda Brown investigates the myths that acupuncturists and herbalists have told about the birth of the healing arts. Moving from the Han (206 BC–AD 220) and Song (960–1279) dynasties to the twentieth century, Brown traces the rich history of Chinese medical historiography and the gradual emergence of the archive of medical tradition. She exposes the historical circumstances that shaped the current image of medical progenitors: the ancient bibliographers, medieval editors, and modern reformers and defenders of Chinese medicine who contributed to the contemporary shape of the archive. Brown demonstrates how ancient and medieval ways of knowing live on in popular narratives of medical history, both in modern Asia and in the West. She also reveals the surprising and often unacknowledged debt that contemporary scholars owe to their premodern forbearers for the categories, frameworks, and analytic tools with which to study the distant past.
Miranda Brown is an associate professor of Asian languages and cultures at the University of Michigan. She has published numerous articles on various aspects of Chinese medical and cultural history in both English and Chinese. She is the author of The Politics of Mourning in Early China (2007) and the coauthor of A Brief History of Chinese Civilization (2012, with Conrad Schirokauer). She is a coeditor of Fragments: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Ancient and Medieval Pasts, a journal that she founded with leading U.S. scholars.
INTRODUCTION
This book began as an indictment of the present. My goal was to expose and clear away the distortions introduced by modern ideologies into our interpretation of ancient Chinese medical history beginning in the nineteenth century. I had expected to find evidence of these ideologies in the various retellings of ancient medical history – namely, narratives that assume the progress of knowledge over the ages and relate the triumph of reason over superstition. This, of course, I found. But to my surprise, there was more. In modern retellings of Chinese medical history, I also discovered the tenacious survival of ancient historiographical practices, traces of which are everywhere, expressed in the selection and interpretation of the archive.
I first became aware of old historiographical practices while looking for evidence of modern bias. Nowhere did such bias seem more obvious than in the presentation of ancient figures by twentieth-century historians. Take Joseph Needham (1900–95) and Lu Gwei-djen 魯桂珍 (1904–91), for instance, two individuals often referred to as pioneers in the history of Chinese science. Their views on the origins of Chinese medicine are set forth in two seminal works, Celestial Lancets: A History and Rationale of Acupuncture and Moxa (1980) and an influential volume on medicine in Science and Civilisation (2000).
Their story about the progress of Chinese medicine enumerated the achievements of what they called the “fathers of medicine.” Chinese medical history begins with the “liberation” of healing practices from the older, purely magico-religious understandings of illness. According to Needham and Lu, the signs of such a shift may be glimpsed in the prognoses of Attendant He 和 (fl. 541 BC), whose “lectures” revealed the advance from magic and religion to primitive scientific theory.1 Attendant He’s breakthrough was then followed by the achievements of Bian Que 扁鵲, a mythical court physician with murky dates and lauded as a Chinese “Hippocrates.” Next in the sequence of medical progenitors was Chunyu Yi 淳于意 (fl. ca. 180–154 BC) of the Han 漢 dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), whose records of consultation proved that “the examination of the sick person, the investigation of the clinical history, the comparison of data from different examinations, and the therapeutic deductions all formed part of a discipline which constituted a valid and valuable precursor of contemporary clinical science.”2 The achievements of Zhang Ji 張機 in the early third century AD were next, as Zhang was the “first to set forth prescriptions in detail, and the first to classify febrile illnesses. . . .”3 Then came Hua Tuo 華佗 (d. AD 208), who won “enduring fame for his skill in surgery and related disciplines, his early use of some kind of anesthesia, and his discoveries and inventions of medical gymnastics. . . .”4 Last were two figures of late antiquity, Huangfu Mi 皇甫謐 (AD 215–282) and Wang Xi 王熙 (AD 180–270?):
the first purportedly composed the earliest work on acupuncture, whereas the other perfected the techniques of pulse diagnosis.5 Needham and Lu surely were not alone in imbuing ancient healers with modern significance. Similar descriptions run throughout the literature, a literature Nathan Sivin criticizes for “chronicling the careers of Great Men.”6 Indeed, a scan of the historiography reveals a similar emphasis on the ancient healer’s achievements. Notably, such an emphasis is found in the History of Chinese Medicine (Zhongguo yixue shi 中國醫學史) by Chen Bangxian 陳邦賢 (1889–1976), initially published in 1919 and sometimes described as the first modern history of Chinese medicine. The same historiographical tendency is also on display in an important work by Fan Xingzhun 范行準 (1906–98), a Short History of Chinese Medicine (Zhongguo yixue shilüe 中國醫學 史略; 1986). There, Fan included many of the same descriptions of Needham’s “fathers of medicine”: Attendant He’s famous discussion of illness, Bian Que’s innovations in diagnosis and therapy, Chunyu Yi’s clinical case histories, Zhang Ji’s painstaking emphasis on empirical observation, Hua Tuo’s surgical feats, and the treatises by Huangfu Mi and Wang Xi.7 Over time, what I found most striking about the medical fathers was not so much their modern significance as their sheer ubiquity.
They appear throughout the current scholarship, which has achieved considerable sophistication since Needham and can hardly be thought of as hagiography. Consider the case of mythical Bian Que; scholars like Yamada Keiji 山田慶兒 no longer write about Bian Que as a historical personage.8 Nevertheless, scholars continue to use Bian Que’s biography in a dynastic history as a source, culling it for clues about ancient medical theory and for hints of professional conflict between healers and their occult competitors. Similarly, current historians have moved far beyond Needham’s naïve reading of the textual record, and they no longer treat Chunyu Yi’s biography as evidence of an “advanced clinical science.” Even so, the biography continues to supply scholars with the materials to reconstruct practices of transmission, to examine medical theory in the second century BC, and to nuance our understandings of the relationship between medicine and divination.9 The relevance of the ancient medical fathers to contemporary scholarship is perhaps clearest in a recent work by Liao Yuqun 廖育群, Traditional Chinese Medicine (2011). Like other contemporary historians, Liao approaches his sources with an admirable judiciousness and a broad knowledge of the archaeological record. Still, Liao finds it difficult to write Chinese medical history without invoking the words and deeds attributed to the ancient progenitors of the craft.
This is evident from a short chapter entitled “Stories about Famous Doctors in History,” which contains descriptions of the ancient progenitors and references many of the same stories used by Needham and countless others.10 The medical fathers’ iron grip on the historical imagination is further evident in popular presentations of Chinese medicine. We find them in illustrated cartoons that depict scenes from the life of Bian Que, storybook versions of Chinese medicine from the People’s Republic of China, and popular websites about Chinese medicine targeted at Americans seeking alternative therapies.
All of these describe the achievements of the ancient medical fathers, and some paint portraits of them. For example, the National Institutes of Health sponsored a digital website that summarized an exhibit held at the National Library of Medicine from October 1999 to May 2000. We find there the history of Chinese medicine recounted through the descriptions of legendary and historical innovators: the Yellow Emperor, the Divine Husbandman, Zhang Ji, and so forth; such descriptions were also accompanied by portraits of the ancestors (see Figure 1).11 Where did these fathers of medicine come from? And how did these figures acquire such a prominent place in both the modern historiography and popular imagination? The questions deserve to be asked because the medical fathers hardly represented a natural grouping. After all, the figures were very different from one another. Some of them, particularly Bian Que, depicted in early stone reliefs as half-man and half-bird, were clearly mythical beings. Others, such as Chunyu Yi and Zhang Ji, had a distinctly mundane feel to them.
More importantly, the sources that Needham and other historians used to explain the contributions of these figures – and thus to construct a broader narrative of healing in ancient China – were hardly obvious candidates for medical history. Such sources were materials of disparate periods, authors, audiences, and aims. Very few of them in fact were actually medical treatises, being composed of bits and pieces of historical chronicles, dynastic histories – and worse still, political allegories.12 Given such diversity, how did these figures and pieces of text ever find their way into a single narrative? In other words, what principles or circumstances conspired to give them their stubborn place within the archive?
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