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E-book Imagining Chinese Medicine
While at medical school in north China during the sec-ond Sino-Japanese war (1936–45), Professor Ma chose to specialise in traditional medicine. As a medical graduate in revolutionary China, he was then allocated a position teaching physiology in Peking Medical College (Beiyi Xueyuan ????), which allowed him ample time for reading the medical classics, a pursuit that he found suited him better than clinical work. Trained in both modern and traditional Chinese medicine and self-educated in reading ancient texts, he was well placed thereafter to join the first team of historians at the Institute for the History of Chinese Medicine and Medical Literature at the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine.Life wasn’t always easy at the Academy, and during the years of the Cultural Revolution, he found himself de-nounced, criticised and sentenced to periods of isolation and self-examination. There was little freedom, but a lot of time to further his reading and to wait for the moment when he could resume his research. Throughout, he was working on multiple projects. In 1990 he was finally able to publish his bibliographical work on the history of Chinese medical writing, which remains a first port of call for con-temporary researchers into pre-modern medicine.2 When I first visited his office in the Dongzhimen district of central Beijing in the early 1990s, he proudly showed me how one whole wall was lined with notebooks for an unfinished history of acupuncture that he was still busy researching. What was holding him up was the ancient manuscripts excavated in the previous decade from tombs along the Yangzi river, manuscripts which were revolutionising people’s understanding of the history of the formation of a ‘Chinese’ medical identity and the grounding of that identity in unique styles of medicine: acupuncture, phar-macotherapy, nutrition and self-care. In the 90s Professor Ma published the first annotated transcript of the most significant of those medical man-uscripts that were known at that time, excavated from he Mawangdui tombs, and it was his commentaries that helped me translate and analyse contemporary manu-scripts from other Han dynasty tombs during my phd years at the School of Oriental and African Studies.3 Soon after graduating, my attention turned to some 100 and more medical manuscripts that had been discovered among the tens of thousands of religious texts in Grotto 17 at the Dunhuang Mogao caves at the eastern end of the Silk Roads, only to find that Professor Ma and his colleagues had been working on those same manuscripts for 10 years and had just produced the first, and still the only, comprehensive volume of transcripts of that material in 1998.
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