Zhongguo gudai de yixue yishi yu zhengzhi: Yi yishi wenben wei zhongxin de yige fenxi by Shih-ch’i Chin 金仕起 (review)

The study of medicine in ancient China is as important as it is challenging. The period witnessed the inception of Chinese medical tradition and the establishment of its foundational theories and techniques, yet our understanding of the early development of Chinese medicine is constrained by limited and fragmented sources. In recent decades, the field has been developing rapidly thanks to the discovery of newly excavated manuscripts and the deployment of new historiographical tools for textual analysis. This allows historians of medicine to produce new findings in diverse domains, including the origins of acupuncture and mo 脈, the experience of the body, and the interplay between medicine and occult culture (Yamada 1998; Li 2001; Kuriyama 1999; Harper 1998). Chin Shih-ch’i’s Medicine, Medical History, and Politics in Ancient China (Zhongguo gudai de yixue yishi yu zhengzhi 中國古代的醫學, 醫史 與政治), one of the latest achievements in the field, moves to a new direction by exploring the discursive function of ancient medical writings with an emphasis on the role of politics in these texts. Previous works on the political dimension of Chinesemedicine tend to focus on the dynamic relation between the body and the state. Manifested in the medical classic Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon (Huangdi neijing黃帝內經), the anatomy of the body correlates with the bureaucratic hierarchy of the state and the configuration of the universe. In this cosmology, the cultivation of the body and the administration of the state become the integral and interconnected aspects of one enterprise (Sivin 1995a). Although the discussion of the body politic is not lacking in Chin’s book, his main interests lie elsewhere. In particular, Chin emphasizes the discursive nature of the medical texts in ancient China and attempts to identify the ideological, political, and social elements that shaped the writing of these texts. In the introduction, Chin makes his historiographical orientation clear: