Making Sense of Illness and Healing: Medical Narratives in Premodern Chinese Literature

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Illness and healing as experiences at the heart of the human condition have found manifold expressions in Chinese literature since pre-imperial times. These literary representations are not only fascinating because they reveal how their authors tried to make sense of the working of their bodies, of illness, and healing but also because the rhetorical and ideological functions of these “medical narratives” within their surrounding texts are important markers of larger social and cultural developments.
This panel brings together four presentations dedicated to a variety of literary genres—historical writing, poetry, letters, and fiction—and to historical periods throughout imperial China: J. Michael Farmer (UT Dallas) focuses on historical anecdotes about men who used medical excuses to reject official appointments in the first century CE; Antje Richter (CU Boulder) studies the relationship between the popularity of the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa sūtra and the rise of sickbed poetry in medieval China; Lik Hang Tsui (Harvard) investigates how and why Song literati such as Ouyang Xiu wrote to others about medical care and their health in letters; and Andrew Schonebaum (Univ. of Maryland) traces the late imperial transformation of the physician as a literary character and relates it to aspects of Qing literati identity. The multi-genre, thematic approach of the panel aims to develop the field of medical humanities within Chinese Studies, where the complex interface between literary representation and medical practice is a truly promising field, not the least because interconnections of these branches of knowledge are pervasive throughout Chinese literature and culture.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Antje Richter, University of Colorado Boulder

Chair

• Antje Richter, University of Colorado Boulder

Individual Presentations

• I Once was Blind, but Now I See: Calling in Sick during the Reign of Gongsun Shu - J. Michael Farmer, University of Texas at Dallas

• Emulating Vimalakīrti: The Rise of Sickbed Poetry in Medieval China - Antje Richter, University of Colorado Boulder

• Epistolary Bodies: Reports about Health and Medical Resources in Middle Period Chinese Correspondence - Lik Hang Tsui, Harvard University

• Classifying the Unseen: Fantasy and Narrative in Chinese Medical Literature - Andrew D. Schonebaum, University of Maryland, College Park

Discussant

• Dore J. Levy, Brown University