A Chinese Physician: Wang Ji and the "Stone Mountain Medical Case Histories" (review)

In the twenty-first century, Joanna Grant has breathed new life into the writings of the sixteenth-century Chinese physician, Wang Ji, through a study of his major text, Shishan yian (Stone Mountain Medical Case Histories, 1531). By applying three analytical methods, including socioeconomic/biographic analysis, textual analysis, and gender analysis, Grant has extracted from Wang Ji's work not only pre-modern, but also modern and even post-modern themes.

In the first chapter, Grant uses various historical sources, as well as modern secondary literature, to examine the social, economic, and cultural developments in Wang Ji's time. In sixteenth-century Huizhou, Wang Ji witnessed rapid socioeconomic growth, with ensuing social and cultural changes and the rise of a new and prosperous merchant class. These factors had a strong influence on Wang's daily and professional life. By placing Wang in his historical context, Grant ingeniously draws the reader's attention to Wang's potential major clients, the merchants of the day, whose lifestyle and behavior were thought to be extravagant and debauched. Understood in this setting, Wang's attentiveness to issues of male health becomes reasonable, or even inevitable. Such a conclusion also justifies the gender analysis Grant applies in the fourth chapter.

In the first chapter, Grant focuses on the medical culture of the sixteenth century and examines Wang Ji's background training, medical career, and medical writings. According to Grant, Wang Ji was famous and respected in his time, but fit into no single category of social status. Wang was not merely a local medical practitioner in Huizhou, but also a typical Confucian doctor in China. Shown in this light, Wang Ji takes on greater significance for his time, and Grant's choice to study Wang takes on greater significance for the history of Chinese medicine.

In the second chapter, Grant looks into Wang Ji's major text, the yian, or medical case histories, to investigate the genre, its purpose, and its function. Grant successfully demonstrates that medical case writings were full of subjective choices by their author or editor, and she finds evidence of the influence of a competitive market that made medical practitioners worry about the practical aspects of their publications. Through the Shishan yian, Wang and his editor established a medical lineage to compete with and challenge other leading practitioners. Strange medical cases were chosen to highlight Wang's medical skills and to secure his authority. Grant demonstrates how these efforts were, in part, self-promotional. But Grant might have noted further that Wang Ji's Shishan yian is the first extant text to be entitled yian, dating by its publication the early emergence of this important genre of sixteenth-century medical writings and establishing Wang as a major figure in Chinese medical history.

The fourth chapter is the longest in Grant's book, emphasizing the important role played by the analysis of gender issues in her reading of the Shishan yian. Although Wang Ji might not have demonstrated a modern awareness of gender, he did show a sensibility to this distinction in treating his patients. Grant does well in adopting a balanced method by looking into both male and female cases, dividing her research into five main sections to examine closely the structure of Wang Ji's histories. The Shishan yian was not a gynecological or obstetrics text, and male patients outnumbered female patients, providing a fine opportunity to investigate Wang Ji's attitude toward his male clients in their socio-economic context. The limited number of female cases in the Shishan yian makes it correspondingly more difficult to assess Wang Ji's concern with women's menstruation, their reproductive abilities, and related properties.

Grant successfully shows a difference between the ways in which Wang Ji diagnosed and treated his male and female patients and concludes that there is some interplay between medical practice and cultural symbolism. There also appeared to have been a greater divergence...