Speaking of epidemics in Chinese medicine
Subtitle: disease and the geographic imagination in late imperial China
By: Marta E. Hanson
Series: Needham Research Institute series; Needham Research Institute series
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Abingdon, Oxon
Language: eng
Number of pages: 265
ISBN-13: 9780415602532; 9780203829875
Description: "This book is the biography of a Chinese disease. Born in antiquity and reaching maturity during the epidemics that swept China during the seventeenth-century collapse of the Ming dynasty, the ancient notion of wenbing Warm diseases continued to play a role even in the response of Traditional Chinese Medicine to the outbreak of SARS in 2002-3. By following wenbing from its birth to maturity and even life in modern times this book approaches the history of Chinese medicine from a new angle. It explores the possibility of replacing older narratives that stress progress and linear development with accounts that pay attention to geographic, intellectual, and cultural diversity. By doing so it integrates the history of Chinese medicine into broader historical studies in a way that has not so far been attempted, and addresses the concerns of a readership much wider than that of Chinese medicine specialists"--Provided by publisher.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: (Publisher-supplied data) Chapter One Medical History in Three Themes: Chinese epidemiology, the geographic imagination, and a biography of wenbing Warm diseases 29; title: Chapter Two A Deep History of the Chinese Geographic Imagination: The five directions, northwest-southeast dichotomy, and southern shift 76; title: Chapter Three The Geographic Imagination in Ming Medicine: Northern purgatives, southern restoratives, and conceptions of north and south 130; title: Chapter Four Ming Medical Frontiers: Diseases of the Far South, new conceptions of contagion 179; title: Chapter Five Ming Medical Skepticism: Epidemiological Crisis, Cosmological Criticism 238; title: Chapter Six Matters of Place: Epistemological Divisions, Genealogical Divergence 273; title: Chapter Seven Emergence of Traditions: The nineteenth-century genealogy and geography of Warm diseases 331.