Jindai zhongyi de shentiguan yu sixiang zhuanxing: Tang Zonghai yu zhongxiyi huitong shidai 近代中医的身体观与思想转型：唐宗海与中西医汇通时代 [Views of the Body and Intellectual Transformation in Modern Chinese Medicine: Tang Zonghai and the Era of Chinese-Western Medical Convergence] by Pi Kuo-Li 皮国立 (review)

Tang Zonghai 唐宗海 (1851–97) is well known as one of the earliest modern proponents of the integration of Chinese and Western medicine. In Views of the Body and Intellectual Transformation in Modern Chinese Medicine: Tang Zonghai and the Era of Chinese-Western Medical Convergence, Pi Kuo-Li presents a highly textured analysis of Tang’s attempts to join Western anatomy with concepts of the body drawn from the medical classics as well as the broader historical context that made this intellectual project such a pressing endeavor. The period in which Tang lived saw the beginning of an increasingly critical appraisal of the forms of bodily knowledge underlying the authority of physicians of classical medicine. This reassessment of medical knowledge of the body stemmed from several sources, foremost among them the challenges of the physician Wang Qingren 王清任 (1768–1831), who criticized received understandings of the body from within classical medicine, and the arguments of Western missionaries like Benjamin Hobson (1816–73), who legitimated their own medical learning (and missionary enterprise) by criticizing Chinese physicians’ lack of dissection-based anatomical knowledge. Enter Tang Zonghai, a physician and literatus who engaged with the critiques of Wang Qingren and proponents of Western anatomy while defending the authority of “qi transformation” (qihua 氣化) and its associated notions about the workings of bodies and their relationship to the cosmos as the most authoritative foundations for medical knowledge. Pi explores Tang’s defense of the medical classics through a detailed study of the bodily knowledge at the heart of his medical thought. In the process, Pi presents a well-contextualized intellectual biography of a figure who continued to inform debates over medical knowledge and authority in following decades.

The book begins with an overview of the broader historical and intellectual context that shaped Tang’s engagement with Western anatomy (chapter 2). After exploring the ways in which Tang’s background, travels, and social networks informed his trajectory as a scholar-physician, this chapter presents an interesting discussion of the status of anatomical inquiry within the intellectual climate of mid-late nineteenth-century China. By exploring the ways in which Tang positioned himself vis-à-vis contemporary debates over medical knowledge and the body, Pi introduces the contours of later arguments: that Tang viewed correlative understandings of the body, its visceral systems of function, and associated medical concepts contained in the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor and the other medical classics to be superior to those that appeared in contemporary works of Western medicine. More than this, Tang used the detailed morphology contained in works of Western anatomy to refine the classics’ ultimately more authoritative form of medical learning.

After providing this important context, Pi moves into a detailed analysis of Tang’s conceptualization of the body as reconstructed from his published works. Chapter 3 explores the ways in which Tang reconciled the position of Wang Qingren and Western anatomical works that the Liver (gan 肝) was located anatomically on the right with the system of correspondences that had originally “placed” it on the left. In this case, as in others, Western anatomy presented a less penetrating challenge than one might expect. It did not dislodge the body of systematic correspondences and qi transformation as the more fundamental framework for physiological and therapeutic reasoning.

In chapter 4, Pi explores Tang’s formulation of the Triple Jiao (sanjiao 三焦) as a significant membrane (think greater omentum) transporting vital substances around the body, a novel formulation of this often-debated visceral system. For Tang, the Triple Jiao played an important role in establishing a coherent vision of the body as an interconnected whole while also integrating the new tissues and...