The Issue of Textual Genres in the Medical Literature Produced in Late Imperial China

Abstract

A great abundance of Chinese medical texts have come down to us since the mid seventeenth century. This is the combined result of the large number of texts written in this period and the fact that the texts were better preserved than earlier. As a matter of fact, the large number of medical texts, coming from various social settings, set historians the quite daunting challenge of understanding what the texts really were and how they should be classified. The idea underlying this article was to go beyond the various modern generic classifications used thus far (“learned”, “popular”, and the like) and to highlight, instead, how medical texts themselves differ from each other. In this aim, I chose to compare a number of excerpts of medical texts written from the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century in different geographical and social settings. And to compare them, I decided to use some tools created by linguists who have been particularly interested in the issues of genre, notably those used by speech act theoreticians. In this article thus, I analyze these excerpts by paying close attention to the five levels of any discourse act, summarized in the well known formula “Who (says) What (to) Whom (in) What Channel (with) What Effect”, following Harold D. Lasswell’s classic communication paradigm. In other words, I try to shed light on how each of these texts differs from the others from the semantic, syntactic and emotional angles and whether these differences can be linked to the authors’ social, geographical, chronological or intentional settings, and, finally, if we can speak of genres in Chinese medical literature.