Searching for the Dao of Medicine

Volker Scheid is a Visiting Scholar at the China Centre, University of Kiel. He was previously Professor of East Asian Medicines and Director of EASTmedicine, a transdisciplinary research group for the study of East Asian medicines, at the University of Westminster, London. He has published two earlier monographs on the history of Chinese medicine in late imperial and contemporary China, a textbook of Chinese medicine formulas, and over thirty papers in peer-reviewed journals. Besides his academic career, he has been a practitioner of Chinese medicine since 1984.

“This book is an extraordinary work of scholarship that contributes in an innovative way to several academic fields.  Sinologists and historians of medicine and science, practitioners and scholars of Chinese medicine, East Asian philosophers, Buddhists and Daoists, and sociologists/anthropologists of religion and medicine – all these fields have much to learn from this magisterial study.” • Judith Farquhar, University of Chicago“This is a groundbreaking synthesis of anthropological insights, theoretical scholarship in the history of science and philosophy, and primary historical sources in late imperial China from the 14th century to the present.” • Marta Hanson, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität (FAU)

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgementsList of Historical FiguresTimelineMapsIntroductionPart I: The Syncretic Dao of Medicine and Medicine in the Age of Wang YangmingChapter 1. Before Medicine as Dao: Surveying an Emergent LandscapeChapter 2. Medicine Turns on Discernment: Danxi’s Syncretic Dao of MedicineChapter 3. Embodying Good Knowing: Medicine and the Body in the Teachings of Wang YangmingChapter 4. Thinking with Medicine in the Age of Wang YangmingPart II: The Devotional Dao of MedicineChapter 5. Following in Zhu Xi’s Footsteps: Fang Youzhi’s Quest for the Dao of MedicineChapter 6. Revealing Zhongjing’s Intentions: Devotional Hermeneutics and Investigating ThingsChapter 7. Order and Orthodoxy: Zhongjing as Medical SagePart III: The Poetic Dao of MedicineChapter 8. Healing the World with Words: Fang Yizhi and the Monk YaodiChapter 9. Responding to the Affairs of One’s Time: Yu Chang’s Path Towards a Poetic DaoChapter 10. The Poet as Physician and the Physician as Poet: Xue Shengbai and Ye TianshiChapter 11. On the Boundaries of the Poetic Dao of MedicinePart IV: The Evidential Dao of MedicineChapter 12. Medicine as Warfare: Ke Qin’s Steps towards an Evidential DaoChapter 13. Antiquity Is Everywhere: The Evidential Dao of Medicine in Edo Japan and Republican-Era ShanghaiConclusionBibliographyIndex