This book investigates the myths that acupuncturists and herbalists have told about the birth of the healing arts. Moving from the Han and Song dynasties to the twentieth century, Brown traces the rich history of Chinese medical historiography and the emergence of the medical tradition archive.

In this book, Miranda Brown investigates the myths that acupuncturists and herbalists have told about the birth of the healing arts. Moving from the Han (206 BC–AD 220) and Song (960–1279) dynasties to the twentieth century, Brown traces the rich history of Chinese medical historiography and the gradual emergence of the archive of medical tradition. She exposes the historical circumstances that shaped the current image of medical progenitors: the ancient bibliographers, medieval editors, and modern reformers and defenders of Chinese medicine who contributed to the contemporary shape of the archive. Brown demonstrates how ancient and medieval ways of knowing live on in popular narratives of medical history, both in modern Asia and in the West. She also reveals the surprising and often unacknowledged debt that contemporary scholars owe to their pre-modern forebears for the categories, frameworks, and analytic tools with which to study the distant past.

In covering the subject of Chinese medicine, this book addresses topics such as oracle bones, the treatment of women, fertility and childbirth, nutrition, acupuncture, and Qi as well as examining Chinese medicine as practiced globally in places such as Africa, Australia, Vietnam, Korea, and the United States.

Explores the ancient system of physiological medicine in China, and the system's applications in the field of modern medicine.

The English edition of Liu Lihong’s milestone work is a sublime beacon for the profession of Chinese medicine in the 21st century. Classical Chinese Medicine delivers a straightforward critique of the politically motivated “integration” of traditional Chinese wisdom with Western science during the last sixty years, and represents an ardent appeal for the recognition of Chinese medicine as a science in its own right. Professor Liu’s candid presentation has made this book a bestseller in China, treasured not only by medical students and doctors, but by vast numbers of non-professionals who long for a state of health and well-being that is founded in a deeper sense of cultural identity. Oriental medicine education has made great strides in the West since the 1970s, but clear guidelines regarding the “traditional” nature of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) remain undefined. Classical Chinese Medicine not only delineates the educational and clinical problems faced by the profession in both East and West, but transmits concrete and inspiring guidance on how to effectively engage with ancient texts and designs in the postmodern age. Using the example of the Shanghanlun (Treatise on Cold Damage), one of the most important Chinese medicine classics, Liu Lihong develops a compelling roadmap for holistic medical thinking that links the human body to nature and the universe at large.

Unschuld provides a description and analysis of the contents and structure of traditional Chinese pharmaceutical literature. Unschuld has selected some one hundred titles in this far-reaching study.

A remarkable journey through Chinese medical illustrations from the earliest illustrated manuscripts to advertising and comic books. Senior and emerging scholars from Asia, Europe and the Americas rethink the history of medicine, its epistemologies and materialities, challenging Eurocentric narratives.