The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule by Reiko Shinno (review)

Do not be misled by the slight stature of The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule; it contains multitudes. In just over two hundred pages Reiko Shinno effectively synthesizes official edicts and histories, biographies, medical instructions, and gazetteers from the Yuan dynasty (1260–1368), all while responding to English-, Chinese-, and Japanese-language scholarship on both Chinese medical and institutional history. Although the Chinese medical traditions of the Song dynasty (960–1276) have attracted much scholarly attention in recent years (see the prologue and chapter 6), before Shinno's doctoral dissertation (Stanford, 2002) and the Politics of Chinese Medicine, which is an "extensive revision" of her dissertation (p. xiii), the history of Chinese medicine during the Yuan dynasty remained relatively opaque. In what is perhaps its most significant contribution to the field, The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule fills a major lacuna in the intellectual and institutional history of Chinese medicine over the past millennium.

If we carefully consider the title of The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule, we might expect a work that explores the official regulation of medicine during the Yuan dynasty. While this is indeed the case, The Politics of Chinese Medicine also provides an overview of the major medical institutions, physicians, and medical texts that emerged during the Yuan period, with a particular focus on the intellectual history of medicine in Southern China under Mongol rule. In chapters 2, 3, and 4 Shinno uses the official edicts preserved in the Institutions of the Yuan (Yuan dianzhang 元典章) and the official histories recorded in the Yuan History (Yuanshi 元史), among many other primary and secondary sources, to describe the establishment of the Imperial Academy of Medicine and regional medical temple-schools (appendix 1), as well as the bureaucratic status of specific physicians (appendix 2) and medical households. These three chapters will surely interest sinologists in particular as well as historians of medicine in general, for, in emphasizing the "politics" in the Politics of Chinese Medicine, they elucidate the relationship between the central government, regional institutions, and familial lineages during the Yuan dynasty for the first time.

In addition to this institutional background, chapters 1 and 5 focus on the biographies of specific physicians, while chapter 6 explores the intellectual developments of "Chinese medicine under Mongol rule." Taken together, these chapters demonstrate Shinno's overarching thesis: although the medical institutions that developed during the Yuan have had a limited legacy in the whole of Chinese history, Yuan Jue 袁桷 (1266–1327), Zhu Zhenheng 朱震亨 (1282–1358), and the other physicians of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century China created a "medical theory that is the foundation of East Asian medicine today" (p. 159). In sum, Shinno argues that the study of Chinese medicine under Mongol rule provides key insights into the relationship between Yuan-era politics, people, and philosophy, while also revealing an orthodox synthesis of competing medical interpretations that has persisted down to the present day.

As indicated above, The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule is a consummate work of philology and history, and Shinno should be commended for the precision of her translations and argumentation. At times, however, the argumentation feels too careful—that is, too grounded in philological detail—such that general interpretive analysis is sometimes left to the reader. Although Shinno thoroughly analyzes the representation of physicians according to several different authors in chapter 5, for example, a more comprehensive analysis of these classifications, like that of the term "Confucian physician" (ruyi 儒醫) found in the prologue (p. 6), is left for future studies. Brief mentions of Buddhist (p. 101) and Islamic sources (huihui 回回, pp. 138–40), as well as non-Chinese physicians (appendix 3), also hint at the hybrid and cosmopolitan nature of medical traditions throughout fourteenth-century Eurasia, although a full study of these topics would be beyond the purview of the work in question. Indeed, I have no doubt that Shinno's careful...