The medical case across cultures: comparing the European Observatio and the Chinese Yi’an

The medical case across cultures: comparing the European Observatio and the Chinese Yi’anIn this lecture, I focus on the history of the case narrative in pre-modern medical cultures, the topic of my forthcoming book. Adopting a cross-cultural perspective, I compare the development of the medical case in pre-modern Europe and China. The comparison is based on my own research for Europe, and, for China, on the excellent studies by Charlotte Furth, Christopher Cullen, and other scholars, who have given us a very rich and nuanced description of the genre in the long duration of Chinese medical culture.

There are some remarkable similarities between the early modern Chinese and European medical case narratives. In fact, the similarities quite outnumber the differences. In this lecture, I will mostly survey the similarities of the genre in the two contexts, while also briefly considering the main points of difference. I will try to provide a comparative answer to the following questions — what kind of medical practice formed the backdrop for the emergence of the case narrative as a distinct epistemic genre? What explains the similarities between the genre in the two contexts? Were they due to some intellectual contact and exchange between pre-modern Europe and China? Or did the case narrative emerge, develop and flourish in each of the two cultures independently?

Date