Novel Medicine: Healing, Literature, and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China.

• Author: Idema, Wiltl
• Position: Book review

Novel Medicine: Healing, Literature, and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China. By ANDREW SCHONEBAUM. Seattle: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS, 2016. Pp. viii + 283. $50

Novels, with their detailed description of the private lives of their protagonists, take the reader inside the home and confront him or her with many aspects of human existence that are largely absent from public life. This applies not only to Western fiction, but also to vernacular Chinese fiction, as it was produced in ever larger quantities from the sixteenth century onward. From the nineteenth century Chinese novels have been translated into Western languages to allow their readers an opportunity to learn about the private life of their subjects. Now that traditional society has disappeared, novels provide a unique vantage point to view its inner workings, because they offer scenarios not only of how people should behave, but also describe how people actually did behave, especially in situations of stress. IIIness is of course one of the situations that test the norms and values of society, and is therefore a popular topic in traditional Chinese fiction, even if not as popular as love or war. At the same time that traditional vernacular Chinese fiction increasingly explored private emotions and actions, medical literature took a narrative turn as it increasingly came to rely on collections of case histories. Where earlier medical literature might have listed symptoms and their cures or provided theoretical discussion on the origins and treatments of disease, in Ming and Qing times collections of case histories provided ever more detailed accounts of individual cases and might go into great detail on the development of both the disease and the treatment, often providing interesting information on the actual interpenetration of scholarly and vernacular traditions of healing.

Andrew Schonebaum's Novel Healing provides a fascinating account from the treatment of illness and healing in vernacular fiction from the sixteenth century to the late Qing, and in so doing displays a remarkable knowledge of the medical literature and practice of the same period. Apart from a short introduction (pp. 3-13), this book is made up of six chapters. The first chapter, "Beginning to Read: Some Methods and Backgrounds" (pp. 14-46), provides an outline sketch of vernacular fiction from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries, as well as a broad picture of the medical profession and its...