Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine
ISBN: 9780203740262
Platform/Publisher: Taylor & Francis / Routledge
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited



The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine is an extensive, interdisciplinary guide to the nature of traditional medicine and healing in the Chinese cultural region, and its plural epistemologies. Established experts and the next generation of scholars interpret the ways in which Chinese medicine has been understood and portrayed from the beginning of the empire (third century BCE) to the globalisation of Chinese products and practices in the present day, taking in subjects from ancient medical writings to therapeutic movement, to talismans for healing and traditional medicines that have inspired global solutions to contemporary epidemics. The volume is divided into seven parts:

Longue Durée and Formation of Institutions and Traditions Sickness and Healing Food and Sex Spiritual and Orthodox Religious Practices The World of Sinographic Medicine Wider Diasporas Negotiating Modernity

This handbook therefore introduces the broad range of ideas and techniques that comprise pre-modern medicine in China, and the historiographical and ethnographic approaches that have illuminated them. It will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Chinese studies, and the history of medicine and anthropology. It will also be of interest to practitioners, patients and specialists wishing to refresh their knowledge with the latest developments in the field.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license


Vivienne Lo 羅維前 is Professor of Chinese History at University College London. She has published widely on the ancient and medieval history of medicine in China and in diaspora. Her research interests include medical manuscripts, medical imagery and the history of nutrition.

Michael Stanley-Baker 徐源 is Assistant Professor in History at the School of Humanities, and of Medical Humanities at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. An historian of Chinese medicine and religion, particularly Daoism, he works on the early imperial period as well as contemporary Sinophone communities. Currently completing a monograph on medicine and religion as related genres of practice in China, he also produces digital humanities tools and datasets to study the migration of medicine across spatio-temporal, intellectual and linguistic boundaries.

Dolly Yang 楊德秀 is a postdoctoral research associate at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. She received a PhD in 2018 from University College London for her investigation into the institutionalisation of therapeutic exercise in Sui China (581-618 CE). She has a particular interest in examining the use of non-drug-based therapy in early medieval China, allied to a passion for translating and analysing ancient Chinese medical and self-cultivation texts.

hidden image for function call