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  • Medieval Chinese Medicine: The Dunhuang Medical Manuscripts
  • Yi-Li Wu
Vivienne Lo and Christopher Cullen, eds. Medieval Chinese Medicine: The Dunhuang Medical Manuscripts. Needham Research Institute Series. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005. xxiv + 450 pp. Ill. $115.00 (0-415-34295-3).

In 1900, a Chinese monk uncovered a cache of thousands of paintings and manuscripts in the Silk Road town of Dunhuang, now part of northwest China. Formerly walled up in a man-made cave in about 1035, these materials now constitute one of the most valuable sources on China and central Asia during the first millennium CE. Worldwide scholarly collaborations on the Dunhuang finds have intensified in the past two decades, epitomized by the founding of the International Dunhuang Project (1994) and its efforts to digitize materials excavated from Dunhuang and other Silk Road sites. This collection in toto comprises some one hundred thousand artifacts in more than twenty different languages and is scattered in repositories in about a dozen countries (http://idp.bl.uk).

The present volume exemplifies the great value of such international collaborations with its study of medical and medicine-related manuscripts from the Dunhuang trove. Combining selected papers from an international conference held in 2000 with articles subsequently solicited from leading experts, Vivienne Lo and Christopher Cullen's thoughtfully designed collection lays out the intellectual architecture of a scholarly subfield and makes it accessible to an English-speaking audience. The result is an important contribution to the historiography of human healing.

The first part of the book highlights the methodological challenges that these medieval works present: how to transcribe nonstandard Chinese ideographs (chap. 2), how to assess the chronological and geographical context in which the texts were produced, how to discern a text's intended audience or function (chap. 1, 3, 4). Each of the following three sections focuses on a different category of knowledge and practice: divination and iatromancy, self-cultivation and popular medicine, and pharmacology. The substantive chapters are further complemented by two useful appendices: a list of 170 identifiable medicinal substances named in these works and an annotated bibliography of the seventy-four Dunhuang medical manuscripts.

A recurring theme that unifies the papers is how to situate the ideas found in the Dunhuang texts with respect to the synchronic diversity of healing practice and diachronic changes in the content and context of text-based medicine. A particularly salient issue is the filiation of ideas between medical and nonmedical spheres. For example, did a collection of love charms develop from medical divinatory methods or from the literature on "bedroom arts" (chap. 7)? How did physiognomy and the calendrical arts shape the diagnostic and prognostic [End Page 433] methods used by healers and laypeople (chap. 5, 6, 8)? A text describing sexual techniques could be based on medical manuals for promoting health and fertility, yet simultaneously serve as an entertaining treatise on carnal pleasure (chap. 10). Similarly, religious eclecticism manifested itself in medical writings that were ostensibly Buddhist but were in fact based on self-cultivation and longevity practices rooted in Daoism (chap. 11).

The Dunhuang texts also provide new points of reference for assessing the medical developments of later eras. Here we find older discussions of important etiological categories such as wind-related maladies (chap. 15) as well as previously unseen texts on materia medica (chap. 12, 14). And while moderns speak of acupuncture and moxabustion as twinned, complementary methods, Dunhuang manuscripts show them to be independent and even antagonistic traditions (chap. 9). Also interesting are insights into the transmission of medieval Chinese texts to Japan (chap. 13) as well as a biomedical assessment of a remedy for a condition resembling cardiovascular dysfunction (chap. 16).

Abounding in philological, technical, and bibliographic detail, this is an essential reference source for China specialists and specialists in training. At the same time, these papers address many issues that are of interest to historians of medicine generally, for example, gender and body views, military medicine, epistemological plurality, and the role of texts in creating and disseminating knowledge.

Nonexpert readers will appreciate Susan Whitfield's and Cullen's user-friendly introductions to the field, and even a quick stroll though the chapters will reveal the complexity of...

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