The Art of Medicine in Early China The Ancient and Medieval Origins of a Modern Archive

In this book, Miranda Brown investigates the myths that acupuncturists and herbalists have told about the birth of the healing arts. Moving from the Han (206 BC?AD 220) and Song (960?1279) dynasties to the twentieth century, Brown traces the rich history of Chinese medical historiography and the gradual emergence of the archive of medical tradition. She exposes the historical circumstances that shaped the current image of medical progenitors: the ancient bibliographers, medieval editors, and modern reformers and defenders of Chinese medicine who contributed to the contemporary shape of the archive. Brown demonstrates how ancient and medieval ways of knowing live on in popular narratives of medical history, both in modern Asia and in the West. She also reveals the surprising and often unacknowledged debt that contemporary scholars owe to their pre-modern forebears for the categories, frameworks, and analytic tools with which to study the distant past.

Part I. Before Medical History: 1. Attendant He: innovator or persona?; 2. Bian Que as a seer: political persuaders and the medical imagination; 3. Chunyu Yi: can the healer speak?; Part II. Medical Histories: 4. Liu Xiang: the imperial library and the creation of the exemplary healer list; 5. Zhang Ji: the kaleidoscopic father; 6. Huangfu Mi: from innovator to transmitter; Epilogue: ancient histories in the modern age; Appendix: a problematic preface.

Miranda Brown is an associate professor of Asian languages and cultures at the University of Michigan. She has published numerous articles on various aspects of Chinese medical and cultural history in both English and Chinese. She is the author of The Politics of Mourning in Early China (2007) and the coauthor of A Brief History of Chinese Civilization (2012, with Conrad Schirokauer). She is the editor of Fragments: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Study of Ancient and Medieval Pasts, a journal that she founded with leading US scholars.