Medical Instruction and Popularization in Ming-Qing China

Qiu Xiaomei, a prominent woman doctor born to a modest family in Hangzhou in 1911, started to study Chinese medicine under a master when she was eighteen. Before the master decided whether or not to take her as a pupil, she was questioned on the content of four books given to her three months earlier. These four books were: Yixue xinwu (Mental comprehension of medical learning, 1732), Binhu siyan maijue (Four-character verses on vessels and pulse by Li Shizhen, 1564), Yaoxing zongfu (Verses on the general nature of drugs, fifteenth century), and Tangtou gejue (Recipes in rhymes, 1694). ² These works were four of the most common medical introductory texts of the Ming-Qing period, spannig from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. They tell us much about the way in which beginners were initiated in medicine, and reveal the principal historical period when such literature matured.

Indeed, beginning in the late fourteenth century an increasing number of introductory books on medicine appeared on the book market. The phenomenon was based on several factors: the prevalence of a renovated medical scholarly orthodoxy in the Jin-Yuan period related to the rise of Neo-Confucianism, the consolidation of the various social frameworks of transmission of medical knowledge ³ with, at the same time, the loosening of bureaucratic control over medical learning and practice, ⁴ and the flourishing of a print culture. ⁵ From the Ming onward, medical knowledge, not ratified by any formal authority, became more accessible. It was more accessible because of the availability of an ever increasing number of printed introductory medical books and difficult classics. At the sametime, no national or professional institution exerted any standard teaching program, nor was there any academic body that could effectively set the norm for medical learning, despite the crystallization of the medical scholarly tradition in the thirteenth century.

This paper will look at a number of Ming-Qing medical primers, including those studied by Qiu Xiaomei, to show their development from the Ming to the Qing. These textbooks have several points in common: first, they referred to a similar body of medical classics or related themselves to the Jin-Yuan scholarly tradition; second, there was obvious simplification of the language and content compared to the classics; ⁶ third, most authors of these texts claimed, often in the preface, that the texts were intended for beginners, or their students. We rarely see this genre of printed works before the late fourteenth century. On the other hand, a large number of these published texts in the Ming-Qing periods were, unfortunately, never classified together in a single category as primers in various bibliographies. Moreover, of these texts with sometimes deceptive titles, many are not easily accessible, as they were printed locally, or even copied manually, so that distribution was limited. It is therefore impossible to do a complete survey of Ming-Qing introductory medical texts. Those analyzed in this study, being only a small sample of the entire corpus, are the more accessible or successful ones in the print market. In this respect, these texts are representative of the genre. ⁷

Introductory Medical Textbooks: From a Neo-Confucian Model to a Pragmatic Approach

One of the first systematic introductory medical textbooks of the Ming period is Yijing xiaoxue (Primary study on medicine), written in 1388 by Liu Chun of Shaanxi province, son of a disciple of Zhu Zhenheng, Shuyuan. He was also the author of a number of lesser known medical primers including Bencao gejue (Rhymes on materia medica) and Yaoxing fu (Rhymes on the nature of drugs). Yijing xiaoxue was apparently an important medical introductory textbook in the Ming, as it was prefaced in 1438 by Grand Secretary Yang Shiqi (1365-1444), a key political figure of the early Ming.

Yang highly praised the work, as its rhymes and verses written to facilitate memorization by beginners were based on classics like Suwen (Basic...