Nathan Sivin

Why the Scientific Revolution Did Not Take Place in China--Or Did It?.

SummaryIn this study of early Chinese scientific thought and practice, the author examines the manner in which Chinese scientific and technical studies related to the rest of their thought, and how this impaired the mathematization of hypotheses about Nature, and therefore, the development of modern science in China. Taking as a starting point his study of the works of Shen Kua (1031–1095), the author, through a thorough-going critique of previous work on the Scientific Revolution problem which exposes its assumptions, fallacies and inadequacies, suggests that the initial heuristic question of the title has served its purpose and considers some of the factors that would need to be explored before a comparative history of scientific development can become a possibility.

Science and Medicine in Imperial China—The State of the Field

Sinology and the history of science have changed practically beyond recognition in the past half-century. Both have become academic specialisms, with their own departments, journals, and professional societies. Both have moved off in new directions, drawing on the tools and insights of several disciplines. Although some sinologists still honor no ambition beyond explicating primary texts, on many of the fields frontiers philology is no more than a tool. Similarly, many technical historians now explore issues for which anthropology or systems analysis is as indispensable as traditional historiography.

Raising QuestionsMedicine in China. Paul U. Unschuld

Paul U. Unschuld. Medicine in China. (Comparative Studies in Health Systems and Medical Care.) Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press. Volume I: A History of Ideas. xi + 423 pp., figs., app., bibl., index. 1985.

Therapy in Elite Religions

45. Volume II: A History of Pharmaceutics. xiii + 367 pp., illus., bibl., indexes. 1986.

Some Definitions and Viewpoints

38.50. Volume III: Nan-ching: The Classic of Difficult Issues. viii + 760 pp., figs., apps., index. 1986.

Health Care, Medicine, and Chinese Society

69.75.

Therapy in the State Religion

This chapter examines ritual curing by Buddhists and Daoists. These two religions were based on the use of written texts. The curing of medical disorders was important to both as a means of spreading the faith. They freely adapted techniques from each other as well as from medicine and popular therapy. Certain techniques were peculiar to each. Buddhists in the eleventh century used mantras, rituals of repentance, and drugs energized by incantations or by invocations of divine beings. Buddhists established early hospitals, and often staffed those set up by the government. They originated the notion of karmic disease, the result of immoralities committed in earlier incarnations. Laymen often resorted to Buddhist meditation or prayer for the relief of disease. All the emperors of the Northern Song dynasty patronized Daoist movements and included their liturgy in that of the state; Huizong attempted to make China a theocracy based on the Divine Empyrean movement. The state’s policy of registering popular temples lessened the opposition of the Daoist movements to the worship of popular gods. Daoists’ initiations made them members of the bureaucracy of the gods. They were distinct from other clergy in their use of bureaucratic documents in curing and other rites. They also employed talismans (exorcistic graphs signed with the priest’s official seal). They used their powers to diagnose sickness due to the sins of a dead father or other relative and to take action against it in the courts of the otherworld. Their great rituals sometimes also had curative aims.

Therapy in Popular Religion

This chapter defines how this book uses such basic terms as “health care” and “medicine.” It discusses certain words important in this book such as “elite,” “religion,” and “ritual.” I also set out my positions on a number of contentious issues pertinent to the book, such as how to translate ancient medical terminology, how Chinese medical writings describe the body’s contents and metabolic processes, the role of objectivity in historical studies, the meaning of “culture,” the value of cultural relativism, and the coinage of technical terminology by historians. The chapter also explains some of the book’s conventions, such as the use of “biomedicine” and “formula,” and the use of Chinese personal names.

The Question of Efficacy in the History of Medicine

This book explores the spectrum of health care available to people in Imperial China, and analyzes important parts of it. It focuses on ideas and methods of therapy in the long eleventh century (960-1127) and their interaction. Historians have concentrated on the high medical tradition, with its rich sources, but its physicians treated few outside the class that governed China and owned most of its wealth. Who, then, cared for the vast majority, illiterate, mostly rural, and largely poor? They depended on the resources available in their own villages—from local herbalists, popular priests, and others—and, for epidemics and other collective crises, from Buddhist and Daoist priests and occasionally from local officials. To most Chinese, curative rites were more familiar than medical prescriptions. The book applies medical anthropology and the sociology of medicine to interpret the rich evidence of ritual therapy in the eleventh century.

Book Review: Computing Ephemerides in China: Le Calendrier Chinois: Structure et Calculs (104 av. J.-C.-1644)Le Calendrier Chinois: Structure et Calculs (104 av. J.-C.–1644). MartzloffJean-Claude (Sciences, Techniques et Civilisations du Moyen Âge à l'Aube des Lumières, xi; Honoré Champion Éditeur, Paris, 2009). Pp. 430. €50. ISBN 978-2-7453-1911-1.

The state religion was the system of rituals that underlay imperial rule. Imperial religion, ritual and politics were never separable. Nor were religion and health. Since the state religion has regularly been confused with Confucianism, this chapter first explains what the religious part of its rituals actually comprised in the eleventh century, and then examines the part that health care played in it.