Book Review: Medieval Chinese medicine: the Dunhuang medical manuscripts

In the past three decades, historians have shown the early history of Chinese medicine to have been far more complex than imagined by previous generations of scholars. The discovery in the 1970s and 1980s of numerous medical manuscripts at Han dynasty archaeological sites such as Mawangdui has led to the re-evaluation of virtually everything we thought we knew about medical knowledge in the late centuries bce. Research on the Dunhuang manuscripts should have a similar impact on the study of medieval Chinese medicine. The articles collected here emphasize a diversity of theories and practices, and completely overturn the misconception that the medical system as presented in canonical texts like the Huangdi neijing dominated healing in this period. Originally discovered in 1900 in a sealed room in a Buddhist cave in the Silk Road oasis town, thousands of Dunhuang's manuscripts were sold to the European explorers Sir Aurel Stein and Dr Paul Pelliot and found their way into French and English libraries. In his introduction to the volume, Christopher Cullen points out that, while scholars have long recognized these texts as important sources for the study of Buddhism, linguistics, and social history, historians of medicine have generally overlooked them, despite their accessibility and geographical proximity. The work of many of the contributors to this volume is already well known. Several authors recently participated in a French publication on Dunhuang manuscripts (Marc Kalinowski (ed.), Divination et societe dans la Chine medievale, Paris, 2003), which may be considered a companion volume to the present title. However, Lo and Cullen also include numerous scholars from China and Japan whose work is only rarely made available in western languages. One of the strengths of this volume thus lies in its ability to introduce the English-speaking world to these foreign scholars and their important research. A summary of the contents reveals the diverse character of this volume, and of Dunhuang medicine itself. Part 1 includes articles by Paul Unschuld, Zheng Jinsheng, Wang Shumin, Zhao Ping'an, and Xie Guihua, who discuss the importance of manuscripts as sources in the study of Chinese medical history and present overviews of major collections to provide context for the Dunhuang texts. In Part 2, chapters by Marc Kalinowski, Donald Harper, Liu Lexian, and Catherine Despeux present evidence that iatromantic and divinatory arts were important at Dunhuang as well as in medieval Chinese society generally. In Part 3, dedicated to the culture of yangsheng (nourishing life) as an important influence on medical knowledge, Vivienne Lo, Sumiyo Umekawa, and Sakade Yoshinobu review sometimes surprising texts on moxibustion, love magic, and Daoist self-cultivation techniques. Part 4, a section on pharmacology, includes chapters by Wang Shumin, Mayanagi Makoto, Chen Hsiu-fen, and Anthony R Butler and John Moffett, who discuss pharmacological manuscripts and the issues they raise in the historiography of Chinese drugs. A valuable appendix presents an annotated bibliography of the Dunhuang medical texts in the collections. If the reviewer must find fault with this groundbreaking work, then it would only be to point out that many essays tend toward highly specialized analysis of individual manuscripts. For this reason, it will not as readily appeal to non-specialists as the French volume mentioned above, which presents a more thematic treatment of topics like hemerology, talismans, and topomancy. On the other hand, this book is among the few in English to tackle this eclectic period in Chinese history, and the only one to deal with Dunhuang medicine. For this reason alone, it is an invaluable contribution to the field. Taken as a whole, these authors, whether focused on the minute details of particular philological problems or comprehensive surveys of manuscript caches, have provided in-depth snapshots of the diverse medical culture of medieval China. The contributors have illuminated medical ideas and practices that co-existed with, challenged, and informed the more familiar classical tradition, but that are not readily apparent within the canonical texts themselves. In so doing, they have added greatly to our understanding of the complexity of medicine at Dunhuang, and of Chinese history more generally.