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VI Epilogue: Toward a Comparative Historical Anthropology of Medical Thought 1. THE SU WEN: DOCUMENT OF A NEW STYLE OF THOUGHT The texts collected in the Su wen, as heterogeneous and at times contradictory as they may be, share at least one central feature. They reflect a deliberate break with an older tradition and the genesis of an innovative style of thought that proved to be the seed of a long-lasting new tradition. Briefly, the older tradition comprised a concept of health care on the basis of the firmly established belief that human illness was caused by demons, ancestors , and “bugs”; curing, it was believed, could be achieved by placating ancestors with prayers, by warding off demons with spells and apotropaic substances , and by killing “bugs” by means of pharmaceutical drugs.1 In stark contrast, the new tradition that evolved from the Su wen refused to assign numinous agents and bugs such a role. It focused on environmental conditions, climatic agents, and behavior as causal in the emergence of disease ; on the importance of laws, structures, and morale in the explanation of illness; and, in addition to dietetics, on a new technique, acupuncture, in the prevention and treatment of ailments. The new therapy system evolved after the unification of the empire in 221 b.c. and found expression in a large pool of texts written between the second century b.c. and the first century a.d., which in turn found entrance into compilations such as the Su wen, the Nan jing, the Ling shu, and the Tai su beginning in the first century a.d. It conveyed images of the human body and theories concerning the functioning of the human organism and its various parts that went far beyond the ideas and the knowledge expressed in the Mawangdui manuscripts and other documents reflecting the status quo of the third and second centuries b.c. Most important, the texts collected in the Su wen and other Han-era compilations mark the beginning of medicine in China. Chinese civilization had 319 developed a culture of health care in prehistoric times; the period from the late Zhou to the late Han saw the emergence of medicine as a new and distinct facet of health care. Medicine in this narrow sense is the attempt to explain disease and health of man solely on the basis of natural laws. These laws guarantee a natural order independent of place, time, and human or metaphysical beings. For the first time, “nature was indeed understood as impersonal, constant, and rule-governed.”2 The Su wen is of pivotal importance as a literary source in examining these dramatic developments and in asking what stimuli may have prompted them. Based on the early bibliographic history of the text,3 we may hypothesize that most of the contents of the textus receptus (excluding the one-third added by Wang Bing in the eighth century) was written between the first century b.c. and the second century a.d. That is, while the Su wen itself documents a decisive turning point in ancient Chinese intellectual history, its compilation occurred long after Chinese intellectuals had begun to write down and make known to others their insights into, their opinions on, and their knowledge of the issue of human existence, in regard to both its social and its natural environment. Hence a wealth of sources are available to examine the concepts of health and illness, the groups in society ascribing to them, the worldviews adhered to by these groups, and the socioeconomic structures in existence in China before the first century b.c. and in subsequent centuries. The contents of the Su wen, then, and the literary materials preceding it offer a unique opportunity to analyze the generation of a new perspective on an old human problem: how to interpret illness and how to devise strategies to avert situations perceived as threats to one’s well-being or even to one’s life. The emergence of the new perspective outlined in the Su wen was no natural event like the eruption of a volcano or the drifting apart of the continents , and it was not a purely intentional act committed by some curious naturalists either. Rather, it was a production of knowledge and values by humans acting in what could be hypothesized as an inescapable response to far-reaching changes in their environment. Analyzing the Su wen, therefore, means uncovering a large number of factors that fed into...

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