Reviewed by: Antiquarianism, Language, and Medical Philology: From Early Modern to Modern Sino-Japanese Medical Discourses ed. by Benjamin Elman Yumi Kim Benjamin Elman, ed. Antiquarianism, Language, and Medical Philology: From Early Modern to Modern Sino-Japanese Medical Discourses. Leiden: Brill, 2015. viii + 232 pp. Ill. $135.00 (978-90-04-28544-6). Medicine in early modern East Asia (ca. 1400–1850) largely revolved around the knowledge of both ancient Chinese medical classics and critical exegeses of these classics produced by subsequent generations of physicians and scholars. The medical classics included such texts as the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon (Huangdi neijing, compiled first century BCE) and the Treatise on Cold Damage and Miscellaneous Disorders (Shanghan zabing lun, ca. 219 CE). In the commentaries and interpretations of the classics that followed from the tenth century onward, doctors in China, Japan, and Korea engaged in a wide range of philological activities, from [End Page 713] discussing how ancient doctrines could be applied in clinical practice to correcting poorly copied manuscripts. Through tributary and commercial exchanges of books and medicinal products that reached a peak in the early modern period, a veritable East Asian community of scholar-physicians coalesced around the study, evaluation, and application of the medical classics and their commentaries. Antiquarianism, Language, and Medical Philology explores this complex East Asian exchange of medical knowledge across time and space. A product of a series of research seminars at Princeton University, this collection of eight essays and an introduction highlights the unique challenges involved in adapting the ancient Chinese medical classics to the circumstances of early modern societies. The first two essays discuss interpretations of the medical classics in China from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries. Asaf Goldschmidt examines how Song dynasty (960–1276) physician Xu Shuwei used case studies, a then-innovative genre of medical writing, as a pedagogical tool aimed at helping physicians diagnose and treat Cold Damage disorders. Fabien Simonis explains the rise and fall of what he calls the “Danxi synthesis,” a syncretic approach to medicine between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries that historiography has largely overshadowed by dividing medical trends into competing schools. The remaining six essays consider the reception and adaptation of Chinese medical classics in Japan from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. Daniel Trambaiolo analyzes the eighteenth-century “Ancient Formulas” (kohō) doctors who rejected the dominant Song medical style in favor of restoring ancient medicine through philological study of classical texts. Mathias Vigouroux explores the reception of acupuncture in Japan from 1500 to 1800, employing a comparative framework to trace the transmission and uses of the circulation channels theory in both Japan and China. Susan Burns turns our attention from elite physicians to a nineteenth-century village doctor who, like his elite and urban counterparts, engaged with the canonical texts and medical debates of his time while treating patients in rural areas. Federico Marcon considers the modern fate of a field of early modern nature study (honzōgaku) developed out of a corpus of Chinese medicinal texts. Angela Ki Che Leung maps the varied uses of ancient medical knowledge on a disorder called kakké in Japanese and jiaoqi in Chinese, now considered to mostly overlap with symptoms of beriberi. Mayanagi Makoto, in the final essay, charts the transfer of Chinese medical texts and Japanese rare books in the Kojima family’s medical collection into the hands of the Chinese diplomat Yang Shoujing in the late nineteenth century. Specialists in the history of premodern and early modern East Asian medicine will appreciate the broad scope and variety of topics in Antiquarianism, Language, and Medical Philology. Nonspecialists may find the volume less accessible, for it assumes substantial background knowledge of terms and historiographies. In order to appeal to scholars in the history of medicine or East Asian history, it would have been helpful if more of the essays had explained the broader political and social contexts that constrained, enabled, or otherwise conditioned the activities of physicians and scholars grappling with the ancient classics. A few of the authors engage in such contextualization, but most present a seemingly insulated world [End Page 714] of medical ideas and exchanges. Finally, it is unfortunate that there are no essays...
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Jul 1, 2023
Ying-Zhe Bai + 1
Open Access