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E-book Novel Medicine : Healing, Literature, and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China

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Penilaian

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It was the summer of 1843, and in Tai County the okra flowers had just bloomed. Lu Yitian’s aunt, Madame Zhou, enjoyed making medi-cal concoctions and people came from all around seeking her treat-ment. There was a man who had been severely scalded, so that his body was covered in festering sores, and no one had been able to affect a cure. He came to beg for a prescription of Ms. Zhou. She thus consulted the novel Flowers in the Mirror (Jinghua yuan, 1818) by Li Ruzhen (1763?–1830) because she knew that it “used a great deal of well-documented and extensive evidence” (zhengyin haobo) and because the “medical prescriptions work very well” (zhibing dou- xiao). She found in this satirical fantasy of adventures to strange lands a prescription for burns that called for okra flowers soaked in sesame oil to be applied topically. Ms. Zhou followed the prescrip-tion, and the patient recovered quickly. Thereupon, she picked all of the okra blossoms in the area, put them in bottles of sesame oil, and distributed them. According to Lu’s cousin, who related this story to him, there were none who, having received this medicine, were not cured with it.1The ways that novels and medicine illuminated each other in the last decades of imperial rule in China may seem like an unusual topic, but this passage provides some clues about what can be gained from such an investigation. The aunt of a medical expert (or, rather, a liter-ate medical amateur, author, and official) gets a prescription from a novel, and her nephew incorporates it into his store of medical knowl-edge. He then records the story and the prescription in his medical text and his collection of notes, which further circulates the prescription, its source, and use. This story and its dissemination raise questions of intended and actual audience and of what texts written in the vernacu-lar are meant to “do,” especially considering the explicit fictionality of some of the sources used by healers. This sort of reading that focused on gathering useful knowledge for daily life disregarded the nature of the text in which it was found—a manner of reading that was possible precisely because there was so much medical information circulating by the late Qing in various forms. That a medical amateur’s reading of a novel was reprinted in Medical Discourses from Cold Hut (Len-glu yihua, 1858)gives some indication that the authority surrounding practices like reading and healing were becoming diffuse.2 Lu Yitian’s passage suggests that readers were as interested in the nonnarrative, encyclopedia-like aspects of the novel as their authors were in filling novels with displays of every kind of knowledge.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

895.1 SCH n

Penerbit

USA : University of Washington Press., 2016

Deskripsi Fisik

292 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9780295995182

Klasifikasi

895.1

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Chinese Literature

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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