East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (EASTM - Universität Tübingen)
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Wu Xiujie, Ein Jahrhundert Licht: Eine technikethnologische Studie zur Beleuch-tung im chinesischen ländlichen Alltag
Get PDFKarel Davids, Religion, Technology, and the Great and Little Divergences: China and Europe Compared, c. 700-1800
Get PDFThe Catchy Epidemic: Theorization and its Limits in Han to Song Period Medicine
Get PDFThis essay explores functional-configurational and ontological-contaminationist etiological distinctions and the social and political stakes behind them through writings on Warmth disorders/diseases and Warmth epidemics (wenbing 溫病, wenyi 溫/瘟疫) in the period from the Han to the Song dynasties. It shows that the functional-configurational and onto-logical-contaminationist frameworks often coexisted, competed, or alter-nated with each other, offering not only different ways of looking at the world, but authorizing different action in it. Examination of Northern Song (959-1126) campaigns to stop the practice, identified with “southerners,” of avoiding contact with and thereby neglecting the sick, and of Southern Song (1127-1279) controversies over contagion, reveals ideological bases for literati-officials’ preference and support for functional over ontological theories
The Qing Imperial Academy of Medicine: Its Institutions and the Physicians Shaped by Them
Get PDFThis paper is intended to explain the changes in the activities of the Imperial Academy of Medicine during the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). By tracing its precedents and comparing their functions, I will explain its role during the Qing dynasty. Furthermore, the seemingly hidebound institutional codes in fact reveal interesting information about the dynamics of the Academy. Through examining the impacts of the regula-tions on personnel and their careers, we are able to explain the very different requirements of the Qing rulers for their medical service. Up until the Ming period (1368-1644) there was an institutional boundary between medical services for the palace and those for the state, even though they shared the same personnel. The Qing was the first dynasty in which even this unclear line disappeared. In this sense, the Qing Academy did not simply copy the tradition of its predecessors. Instead, the services for the emperor’s individual needs became more and more central to its mission. Thus, the common people’s rather critical perceptions of the bureau were largely true.In spite of its increased emphasis on serving the imperial household, the Qing Academy retained its connections with the government. As an alien regime, the Manchu court’s concern for the security of its rulers was much higher than during the previous dynasty. To meet the needs of the new regime, the device of the Qing Academy emphasized fostering elites rather than selecting them. Now the Academy not only provided medical educa-tion to the junior members as in earlier periods, but also shaped them in behavior. This affected both the organization of the Imperial Medical Academy, and the strategies of the physicians employed in it
The Experience of Illness in Early Twentieth-century Rural Shanxi
Get PDFThis paper uses the diary and other records of Liu Dapeng 劉大鵬 (1857-1942), a Shanxi village resident, to examine how people in rural China experienced and understood illness at an important time of transition for medical systems in China. It explains how Liu understood the illnesses that afflicted himself and members of his family in terms of providence. The healing methods he used ranged through self-medication with folk remedies and modern patent medicines; remedies provided by families friends and neighbours (including acupuncture and prescriptions based on classical Chinese medicine); remedies provided by gods and shamans; and prescriptions provided by professional doctors of Chinese medicine, whom Liu deeply distrusted. It also examines the arrival of Western medicine in Shanxi and argues that while this existed it was incorporated into networks of medicine provided by family and friends, rather than functioning as a separate institutional system
