East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (EASTM - Universität Tübingen)
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The Use of Pain in Childbirth Recorded in Chinese Medical Works
Full text linkIn pre-modern China, midwives and pregnant mothers used pain description as a tool to gauge the progress of childbirth. This was recorded in the twelfth century medical work Shichan lun 十產論 (Ten Topics on Birth), which takes the form of a list, describing routine childbirth, birth complications and the techniques used to manage those specific complications.It was the most widely quoted and disseminated work on childbirth and birth complications in late imperial China. The description of childbirth pain in Shichan lun would shift in meaning and use by the end of the imperial period, leading to the representation of childbirth pain as inevitable, nondescript and immutable. This study examines how pain was a tool for the pregnant woman and birth attendants in Shichan lun. This reading of pain challenges our current understanding of the value and meaning of pain in childbirth physiology
A Missing Link in the History of Chinese Medicine: Research Note on the Medical Contents of the Taishō Tripiṭaka
Full text linkNumerous texts were produced roughly between 150 and 1100 CE that introduced Indian medicine to East Asia. These have historically represented a relatively discrete corpus of health-related knowledge, relatively unintegrated into Chinese medicine and often ignored in mainstream Chinese medical historiography. Buddhist texts do not provide straightforward evidence of a unitary tradition of healing that was transplanted from India to China. However, these sources are critical to understanding the history of medicine in medieval China. In addition, it is not an exaggeration to say that this corpus offers one of the most voluminous sources of textual evidence for the transregional communication and reception of medical ideas in first millennium CE Asia that is available anywhere. Despite the fact that over the long term they were not nearly as significant in Chinese medical history as classical medical models, Buddhist ideas and practices deserve more attention than they have received thus far from our field. This brief research note is meant to introduce historians of Chinese medicine to one easily accessible collection of texts that can be used to begin to fill in this ‘missing link.
Elixir, Urine and Hormone: A Socio-cultural History of Qiushi (Autumn Mineral)
Full text linkTraditional Chinese medicine has attracted the attention of pharmacologists because some of its remedies have proved useful against cancer and malaria. However, a variety of controversies have arisen regarding the difficulty of identifying and explaining the effectiveness of remedies by biomedical criteria. By exploring the socio-cultural history of qiushi (literally, ‘autumn mineral’), a drug prepared from urine and used frequently throughout Chinese history, I examine how alchemy, popular culture, politics and ritual influenced pre-modern views of the efficacy of the drug, and explore the sharp contrast between views of the drug’s function and efficacy in the context of Chinese medicine and contemporary biomedical knowledge. Questioning the biomedical hypothesis that qiushi contains sex hormones, I find that the popular, centuries-long use of qiushi correlates with the efficacy of what has been called ‘the meaning response,’ the merging of alchemy and medicine, the influence of social relations, and the division and mixture of theory and practical us
Consider the Qing Locust
Full text linkThis article examines a 1761 locust eradication operation involving both Mongol and Han personnel, within a larger context of issues related to mutually conditioning relations between people, plants and animals. Such locusts outbreaks, as products of complex environmental relations still not fully understood, could provide unexpected opportunities for intense trans-Great Wall cooperation and bonding among groups often rhetorically and analytically separated by idioms of steppe and sown. Environmental interdependencies that emerge from these incidents may form the analytical basis for empire as a ‘multi-environmental,’ rather than as an anthropocentric multi-ethnic, construct in which ecological factors play a constructive role that is often inadvertent or unacknowledged
Yi Chema and the Psychosocial Body in Late Nineteenth Century Korea
Full text linkConventional understandings of Chinese medicine, and by extension East Asian medicine, are that historical and contemporary discourses on the medical body have essentially revolved around a unitary body perception—the cosmological body as demonstrated by the use of concepts such as qi, yinyang, and the Five Phases. Notably, in this body conception, the material, spiritual and emotional dimensions are not separable from each other but are rather interconnected by means of all-pervasive qi that resonates in the universe. However, East Asian medicine has in fact provided a far more diverse and dynamic landscape of conceptualizations of the body than has previously been assumed. Addressing this relatively ignored topography, this paper investigates medical thought about body structure that was proposed and practiced by Yi Chema 李濟馬 (1837-1900), a physician and Confucian in late nineteenth century Chosŏn 朝鮮 Korea. Rather than considering cosmological factors, he brought into play human affairs and agency in his discussion of the medical body. In the framework of his medical system, later referred to as Sasang 四象 (fourfold imaging) medicine, psychosocial characteristics—such as affective temperaments, cognitive traits, and behavioral dispositions—are inherently interwoven with the configuration of the viscera and body parts. Importantly, the physiological processes of this psychosocial body are not so much maintained by cosmologically resonating qi flowing throughout the body, but rather, they are activated by the human agent’s psychosocial drive to engage with the world.Yi Chema, through his conceptualization of the psychosocial body, envisaged an ideal world in which the qualities and differences of people should be acknowledged to the fullest extent. Thus he rejected hierarchical socio-cultural orderings of human beings in favor of a respect of heterogeneity. Yi Chema’s effort to promote the psychosocial body can be understood against the backdrop of late nineteenth century East Asia, where the mechanistic body of what was then seen as modern medicine was encroaching upon the cosmological body
