Chinese Medicine: The Complex Balance of Individual, State, and Cosmos

5Cs of History, Complexity: #4 of 4. During the Tang dynasty in the mid 8th century, a military leader named Li Baozhen was frustrated with his aging body. He had achieved much military glory and material wealth in his life, but he was aging and facing the fact that death was approaching. But he had also had dreams that he was riding triumphantly through the sky on a crane. Surely this was an omen! At the same time, Li Baozhen met Sun Jichang, who was a fangshi - a word that can be translated as alchemist, wizard, magician, and also doctor or physician. Sun Jichang offered Li Baozhen a concoction that he promised would allow him to “transcend” death. Inspired by his dreams of slipping away from earth on the back of a crane, Li Baozhen took the elixir - only to become incredibly sick. Li Baozhen’s experience captures something of the complexity of Chinese medicine: competing ideas of how to heal, the use of various powerful medicines in careful (and not so careful) doses, the intermingling of spiritual and medicial philosophies, and the quest for health and power, even immortality. For this installment in our series on the five C’s of historical thinking, we’re contemplating the historical concept of complexity through an exploration of Chinese medicine.

Bibliography

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Goldschmidt, Asaf. The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: The Song Dynasty, 960-1200. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009. 

Goldschmidt, Asaf. “Epidemics and Medicine during the Northern Song Dynasty: The Revival of Cold Damage Disorders,” T’oung Pao 93 (2007): 53-109. 

Liu, Yan. Healing with Poisons: Potent Medicines in Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2021. 

Lo, Vivienne and Michael Stanley-Baker, “Chinese Medicine,” in A Global History of Medicine, ed., Mark Jackson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 

The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine, trans. Maoshing Ni. Boston: Shambhala Press, 1995.

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