The history of medicine in China is inextricably tied to the history of intellectual trends, popular beliefs, and social customs. Over the past few decades, historians have thoroughly effaced the old icon which depicted "traditional Chinese medicine" as a timeless corpus of ancient teachings, transmitted by a select group of erudite men. In its place stands a constantly changing landscape of medical practices and beliefs, shaped by healing experts and lay people alike, metamorphosing according to historical era and geographical location. 2 Prior to the twentieth century, there were no legal or professional regulations to distinguish the physician from the neighborhood herbalist or educated medical hobbyist. An untrammeled free market of medical ideas existed, where no one group enjoyed a monopoly over medical knowledge or legitimacy. It is true that educated physicians strove to elevate their status by championing the ideal of the ruyi (literatus-doctor), a scholarly practitioner whose authority rested on his profound mastery of classical medical texts. 3 These upper-class doctors disparaged other groups of healers as "quacks" (yongyi) and railed against the allegedly ignorant lay people who felt qualified to treat themselves or family members after leafing through a few medical books. 4 Historians recognize, however, that such elite physicians constituted only a tiny percentage of all healers, and it is not at all certain that the average medical [End Page 41] consumer took their admonitions to heart. Indeed, in the decentralized medical world of late imperial China, widespread confidence in amateur and popular medicine may have undermined ruyi claims to a privileged medical authority. Charlotte Furth's recent analysis of late Ming dynasty medical cases, for example, shows that patients and their families routinely challenged literati doctors' medical diagnoses and therapeutic strategies. The family home was the main arena in which healing activities took place, and here the judgments of male and female family members competed with those of scholarly doctors. Medical case records and literary accounts from the Ming and Qing all attest to the fact that sick people treated themselves, while also switching freely between different types of healers--physicians, monks, diviners, herbalists--when the expected cure was not forthcoming. As Furth observes, whether or not a doctor could make his views prevail ultimately depended on his ability to obtain the confidence of the household head. 5