Why and how did the strategy of documenting medical practices through personal experience rise to prominence in China? This question is at the heart of Good Formulas, the first book-length study of the use of empirical evidence in Chinese medicine between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. The rise of this new approach to substantiating knowledge, which had appeared only sporadically in earlier medical literature, provides a window into transformations in the construction of textual authority in mid-imperial China.
Focusing on medical genres and working extensively with notebooks (biji), Ruth Yun-Ju Chen shows that employing empirical evidence became prominent in conjunction with a publishing boom that enabled wider availability of medical texts and treatises. To convince a more socioculturally diverse readership to believe their claims and to win intertextual debates with contemporaneous authors, many Song medical authors turned to empirical methodology. Revealing a correlation between publishing cultures and changes in persuasion strategies in medical genres, Good Formulas offers new insights into the histories of medicine, knowledge production, and publishing in China. It also provides rich examples for scholars interested in the development of empirical evidence in the premodern world.
Описание: The Formulas of the Golden Cabinet with Songs is a nineteenth century commentary by Chen Xiuyuan on the Jin Gui Jao L e (Essentials from the Golden Cabinet), the famous Han dynasty formulary and companion volume to the Shang Han Lun (Treatise on Cold Damage) by Zhang Zhongjing. Translated by Sabine Wilms to the highest academic standards and yet eminently readable and intended for clinical application, the present volume discusses the first 100 formulas contained in the Han source text. To explain the internal logic of the formulas, interaction of medicinals, and precise clinical indications, the author quotes a selection of commentators and physicians throughout the ages while also stating his own understanding. Beginning with a full translation of the Jin Gui source text, each entry appears as its own vignette that includes indications and associated symptoms, formula ingredients (converted into modern measurements), instructions for preparation, and commentary. The present edition is bilingual in Chinese and English. To increase clinical applicability, we have also included brief modern monographs for each formula in the appendix. An extensive 324-page book, this is a must-have for all Jingui lovers out there.
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