Andrew Schonebaum has written an insightful and original historical work on popular medicine and literature in late imperial China. This study captures the convergence of two long-standing research themes in Chinese literature, one on vernacular literature as a critique of the overemphasis on the “metropolitan language culture,” meaning the centrally positioned neo-Confucian culture, a theme brilliantly developed by the late Glen Dudbridge, and the other on the relevance and importance of medical things in such literature, a topic opened up by the erudite Wilt Idema in 1977.Footnote 1 In Novel Medicine, Schonebaum brings vernacular medicine to the fore by analyzing the intertextuality of the popular novel and medical genres. This inspiring approach is partly driven by the abundance of recent publications on the history of medicine in late imperial and modern China, and the increasing accessibility to the rich corpus of popular literary and medical genres.
The term “novel medicine” invites us to seriously rethink the presumed boundary between medical and literary genres as effective vehicles for popularizing medical knowledge or knowledge of the body in the late imperial and modern periods. While entertaining medical details in popular Ming and Qing novels are quite well known, as shown by the many examples provided in this book, from Peony Pavilion and Story of the Stone to Plum in the Golden Vase and many others, medical texts as entertaining narratives had not been given much thought until the publication of this book. Schonebaum's contribution is to establish the link between the two developments and to show the impact of popular medical knowledge and practices on the construction of both the medical and the literary genres in the period under study. He pertinently shows how even medical classics of this period, like Li Shizhen's Systematic Materia Medica, did not write off popular medical knowledge and practices such as the ritual treatment of demonic influence, and how new medical genres like case history books adopted narrative strategies from fiction to dramatize ailments and miraculous healing so that the cases became entertaining stories to satisfy a growing readership. Without going into the details of the history of book publishing, another important related field of research, examples given in this book are lively witnesses of the vibrant book market of this period.
The notion of “novel medicine” is fully embodied in two Qing literary texts analyzed in this book. The novel Annals of Herbs and Trees, a playful mid-Qing work in which all the characters are named after herbs and pharmaceuticals in a plot that was supposed to strengthen the readers’ knowledge of the natures and interactions of drugs, is an extraordinary and unique example. The famous late Qing novel Flowers in the Mirror, which could be read like a recipe book and was actually used as a medical text well into the Republican period, is another outstanding illustration of the interfertilization of the medical and literary genres. Intertextuality of the novel and medical texts seems to have reached a historical high point from the mid- to the late Qing period.
Schonebaum continues a little into the Republican period by taking up some of the most important medical themes of the time—including illnesses of sex, contagion, and depletion—by using rare medical manuscripts and archival materials in different national and private collections. The modern notion of “novel medicine,” however, remains nebulous because of the insufficient co-analysis with contemporary literary works in this later period. A separate book probably needs to be written on this period, with its rapidly changing views on diseases, the body, love, life, and death, and the emergence of new media.
The main strength of this insightful book is its analysis of vernacular medicine as knowledge and practice in popular printed texts in the late imperial period. Historians of medicine and literature would likely find Novel Medicine most useful and inspiring.
