During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the number of medical writings increased dramatically in every corner of China. While the rise of commercial printing from the late Ming dynasty definitely led to a better preservation of the medical texts produced then compared to older texts, Ming and Qing medical books that have survived in libraries are a tiny part of what was produced. These figures will suffice to illustrate this point: among some 277 medical writings produced in the provinces of Yunnan, Guangxi and Guangdong, during the Qing dynasty, only 36 are extant in libraries. In this talk, after a social analysis of the types of medical works produced in the southernmost provinces of China, I will highlight, on the one hand, the conditions that allow an archive to pass to posterity and, on the other hand, how, in the course of its life, the original archive is transformed. Finally, I will highlight the implications that can be drawn from this historical analysis of the medical archive produced in the southernmost regions of China for a history of medicine in China and especially for the history of treatment.

In the course of the past two or three decades, recipes and recipe books have become a hot topic in the fields of the history of science and knowledge. Researchers have not only drawn attention to the crucial importance of the recipe as an ‘epistemic genre’ for the production, exchange and transmission of knowledge. They have also begun to acknowledge the research value of recipe books – collections of individual recipes – as physical manifestations of these practices. Especially recent research on early modern English recipe manuscripts has provided some stimulating results regarding the socio-cultural history of recipe collecting and exchange as well as the role manuscripts played in this context. In comparison, the study of Chinese recipe manuscripts is almost uncharted territory. This is especially true for all non-textual aspects (palaeography, codicology, visual organization, etc.) and manuscripts from the 19th and early 20th century. This paper aims to shed light on the socio-cultural history of recipe collecting and exchange in that period through an in-depth study of the recipe book Slg. Unschuld 8051 from the Berlin collections of Chinese medical manuscripts. Focusing on recipe attributions, paper inserts as well as on the temporal ‘layers’ of this recipe manuscript from late imperial Canton, the paper will illuminate long-term processes of recipe collecting and exchange and describe the various actors involved in this. In doing so, it aims to uncover the role this recipe book played as personal ‘medical archive’, contributing to the overall aim of writing a microhistory of Slg. Unschuld 8051 in its immediate context.

How do historians of Asian medicine bridge the technical components of our subject and offer theoretical contributions to social theory and political theory? In this paper, I offer a brief analysis of the emergence of suihai 隨海 in clinical research related to Alzheimer’s and dementia. I argue that a close reading of suihai 隨海 offers science studies scholars new ways of conceptualizing the elements of an experimental study. I suggest that suihai 隨海 does not follow the relational definition of what Hans-Jörg Rheinberger put forth over two decades ago. While epistemic objects are made through experimental practice and can turn into technical objects as a means for investigating other epistemic objects, objects like suihai 隨海 do not fit this model. Across many of the clinical investigations of neurological disorders, physician researchers in China were not committed to using their findings to stabilize suihai 隨海. Instead, they used what they already knew about suihai 隨海 from classical medical texts to stabilize the nature of dementia. In other words, suihai 隨海 made clear how dementia served as an epistemic object, not the other way around. In making this argument, I further engage with elements of research and analysis using publicly-accessible information. I take on an intellectual history of suihai 隨海 by joining methods in the social sciences and humanities to expand on critical approaches in STS.

It is now well known that a certain percentage of people will experience psychotic breaks or other serious adverse mental and physical side-effects from practicing meditation. While contemporary scientific literature has recently documented this phenomenon, writings from medieval China not only describe the adverse mental and physical symptoms that can arise in the course of meditation practice, but also explain why these pathologies arise and how they can be effectively treated. Might our historical archives contain untapped therapeutic information that is highly relevant for an emergent mental health crisis in the present day? And if they do, is historical objectivity an ethical position to take toward such materials? Are we historians even allowed to ask these questions, given the norms and structures of our profession?