Médecine, Religion et Société dans la Chine médiévale (review)

Médecine, Religion et Société dans la Chine médiévale, edited by Catherine Despeux, professor at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris and an internationally recognized scholar-specialist of Chinese medicine, is the fruit of an international collaboration that brought together the most eminent scholars in the field of Chinese medical history from France, Germany, England, the United States, and China. This three-volume book is based on an analysis of a corpus of some one hundred manuscripts from Dunhuang, Khotan, and Turfan in western China. The Dunhuang manuscripts, which constitute the largest part of the corpus examined and are also the most available thus far, had been walled up at the beginning of the eleventh century in a Buddhist monastery and were only discovered at the beginning of the twentieth century. The manuscripts from Turfan and Khotan were mostly discovered in tombs during several archaeological campaigns, from the beginning of the twentieth century to present times. Most of these manuscripts, written during the Tang dynasty (618–907), were first studied from the perspectives of religion and political, economic, and social history. It is only more recently that this rich corpus of manuscripts has been analyzed in China and abroad from new perspectives, notably that of the history of science and techniques. Despeux’s book on medical history thus belongs to this pioneering research. It is not the first book, however, to address the question of medical history seen through the lens of the manuscripts produced in one far-distant corner of the Chinese empire in medieval times. As Despeux recalls it, the noted historian Ma Jixing started to work on these manuscripts in the 1960s and published annotated editions of them in the late 1980s (see Ma 1988). In 2005, Vivienne Lo and Christopher Cullen edited the first book on this subject in English, to which several authors of the present book also contributed. The number of manuscripts discovered is, however, enough to provide work for other historians, many of whom, moreover, have looked at them from new perspectives. The present book, in fact, provides additional knowledge on the history of medicine as it can be deciphered from these manuscripts and focuses on aspects that were not to the forefront in Lo and Cullen’s book, such as the identification of foreign influences and the relationships among health care, religion, and the practice of magic. But perhaps what makes this book particularly original and worthy of interest is the perspectives from which it was written. Like Marc Kalinowski’s edited book on divination published in 2003, the present book, in addition to disclosing and contextualizing the content of the manuscripts dealing with health care, provides the reader with highly detailed descriptions of the manuscripts studied, with some of them reproduced photographically in their entirety. This book is thus highly valuable not only for historians of medicine in China but also for all historians interested in the question of the history of text production. To mention only a few, from pages 96 to 103, the reader has access to the entire recto verso manuscript P.3655, the Treatise of the Five Viscera; from pages 176 to 181, the entire manuscript P.3287 concerning Chinese pulse diagnosis; and from pages 866 to 870, the entire manuscript P.4038 concerned with recipes for longevity. The reader is thus offered detailed descriptions and wonderful illustrations (some in color) of how people in medieval times used to write and to make use of paper, of layout, and of processes to make their point clearer or to distinguish ancient from contemporary knowledge. These reproductions are particularly welcome since access to these manuscripts is difficult not only because of the protection measures applied to them but also because once the manuscripts were discovered, they were immediately scattered and added to museums or university collections throughout the world.

As Ma...