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Thesis ID: CBB001561979

The Medical Transforming of Governance and Southern Customs in Song Dynasty China (960--1279 C.E.) (2003)

Hinrichs, T. J. (Author)

Harvard University
Bol, Peter K.

Publication Date: 2003
Edition Details: Advisor: Bol, Peter K.
Physical Details: 327 pp.
Language: English

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This dissertation charts Northern Song (960--1126 C.E.) policies to educate and transform southern mores and customs. These expanded in scope to target responses to disease, especially the eschewing of medicine and the avoidance of contact with the sick during epidemics. They also intensified in approach to include the dissemination of medicines and of medical texts, the arrest and flogging of local shamans, and attempts to make them practice medicine. It examines these policies in relation to views of southern deviance, increasing integration of the south into Song China, transitions in the ruling lite, and political, moral, and cultural agendas that were served by them. The textual, social, and political activities of Song lites that involved them in medicine conditioned their responses to disease-related practices in the south. As officials, they oversaw and participated in the compilation, production, and distribution of medical texts. The Northern Song government expanded the medical bureaucracy and medical examinations; set up medical schools, pharmacies, and hospices; and distributed medicines to victims of epidemics. These activities raised the stakes of non-specialist medical discourse and controversy from something relevant primarily to family or individual choices in healing alternatives, to something with greater implications for political choices, social status, and cultural identity. Whereas southern practices of avoiding contact with the sick had elicited policy responses in the Northern Song, in the Southern Song (1127--1279 C.E.) such responses were, in keeping with the Southern Song withdrawal from activist governance, rare. Instead, the same concerns generated debates over whether epidemics were contagious. In order to better follow these debates, this dissertation explores functional-configurational and ontological- contaminationist theories of epidemics across medical, Daoist, and literati texts. Some lites advocated a narrowly canonical functional-configurational style of medicine, and found this incompatible with the demonic and contagious ontological-contaminationist views of disease of shamanic and exorcistic healers. On the other hand, most lites and most physicians preferred a more eclectic approach to handling disease, employing exorcism and avoiding the sick when deemed appropriate. Others did not deny the contagion of epidemic diseases, but asserted the moral imperative of caring for the sick despite threat of transmission.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 64 (2004): 3436. UMI order no. 3106645.

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