Book review of TJ Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes, Chinese Medicine and Healing. An Illustrated History. Cambridge, Massachusetts, England, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013, in East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal. 2015, vol 9.4, p.429-433.
Résumé
This book traces the long history of practices and ideas around healing processes in
China from the earliest evidence we have found on oracle bones (late Shang dynasty,
ca. thirteenth century BCE) to the “Chinese medicine” currently promoted on the
Internet in our globalized world. It owes much to the dynamic research undertaken
since the 1930s by the Chinese themselves and by international academics over the last
four decades. The book illustrates, by its very format, that this dynamism has gone
from strength to strength: in addition to comprehensive contributions written by
the nine leading international scholars Constance Cook, Vivienne Lo, Fan Ka-wai,
TJ Hinrichs, Angela Ki Che Leung, Yi-Li Wu, Bridie Andrews, Volker Scheid, and
Linda Barnes, we find more than fifty sidebars written by forty or so outstanding
researchers which notably open windows on new fieldwork in such countries as Tanzania, Iraq, and Argentina.