The Geographic Imagination in Chinese Medicine

Abstract:

This book focuses on how northern and southern medical cultures, therapeutic preferences, and corporeal distinctions were delineated in medical texts temporally from the mid-Ming to the end of the eighteenth century and spatially in the Jiangnan region and within the Manchu court. This approach uses new sources and methodologies to refine our understanding of how geography, actual and imagined, shaped both socio-intellectual lineages of medical cultures and rhetorical conceptions of human variation in early modern China. The recent debate on the relative sinification of the Manchus and relative "Chineseness" of those who lived under the Qing government, in fact, has completely elided conceptions of human variation based on regional, ecological, alimentary, and corporeal distinctions. The most important reason for this elision relates, in part, to the types of sources scholars have conventionally relied on. Medical sources, largely ignored, offer a new, fresh, and enlightening lens on these issues.