Paul Unschuld’s and Zeng Jinsheng’s Chinese Traditional Healing is a three-volume introduction to, and survey of, the manuscripts of Chinese traditional medicine in Berlin. It is an extraordinary addition to our knowledge of Chinese traditional medicine (a term the authors use interchangeably with folk medicine), as well as to the study of folk medicine more generally.

Unschuld lays out clearly in the preface to the volumes just what these manuscripts consist of: “these volumes were not written for publication. They were written for personal use…these are collections of diagnostic and therapeutic techniques, of recipes, drug descriptions, and other facets of theoretical and clinical health care gathered and transmitted among the common people without ever having entered printed literature, that is, the canon of Chinese medicine reflecting the ideals of a small elite.” Unschuld continues: “families recorded all therapies they had applied in need or they had learned to consider potentially useful. Lay healers wrote down their personal spectrum of therapeutic approaches and medications [in the books]” (x). The books are thus a very effective mirror of the folk medical practices in China from the seventeenth through the mid-twentieth century, and reveal an aspect of Chinese medical practice hitherto little studied.

The first volume contains a long introduction by Unschuld to the manuscripts; this is really a new introduction to Chinese folk medicine. Unschuld’s introduction covers all of the aspects of the manuscripts, from the codicological to the folkloric. The books are, as one would expect, often produced on very poor paper, and with many mistakes in the Chinese; these were not the product of the elites whose medical manuals have been the primary focus of study in Chinese medicine, whether by Chinese or foreigners. Unschuld’s introduction gives fuller explanations of the contents and concepts encountered in Chinese folk medicine than are given in the manuscript descriptions in the survey of manuscripts, while also bringing together scattered manuscript references to similar things under a single heading. For example, a number of the manuscripts surveyed make reference to plays that were used for selling prescriptions; Unschuld provides a description of these plays and references to the manuscripts containing them on pages 175-184 of the introduction. This first volume also contains a series of sample pages from the manuscripts and a series of extensive indices to the catalogue. Unschuld and Jinsheng have made this work as accessible as possible to the user without Chinese, and thus, in this volume, only in the index of Chinese recipe names is the material given solely in Chinese.

The second and third volumes are a survey of the manuscripts. The 881 manuscripts are given a detailed bibliographical description, which includes the tables of contents where available (though this too is only in Chinese; they do, however, provide an abstract of the contents). The descriptions vary in the level of detail, but they are a mine of information about Chinese folk medicine. On pages 919-925, for example, is the description of a manuscript and the medical play that it includes. This play was, as Unschuld notes, “one of the many pharmaceutical theatre plays performed in China in previous centuries” (920). Characters in such plays would recite the names of the various drugs that the healer offered. The plays could also be humorous. They are, in fact, very similar to plays performed for the Italian medical practitioners known as “charlatans” in the early modern period.

The medicine encountered in these manuscripts can also be supernatural: pages 2337-9 describe a manuscript containing apotropaic texts; curiously, this manuscript is written on “yellow mounting paper as is used for addressing demon spirits” (2338). The purpose of this manuscript is “to advise a Daoist on how to properly perform Daoist rituals, and how to get a hold of spirits and catch demons” (2338). Instructions for spells are also combined in this text with instructions for amulets.

The manuscripts contain an enormous variety of materials on Chinese folk medicine, which, thanks to Unschuld’s and Jinsheng’s careful descriptive work, are now accessible to both the scholar of Chinese folk medicine who reads Chinese, and to other scholars of folk medicine, who, as comparativists, may not.

Chinese Traditional Healing is, quite simply, a superb addition to the library of materials available on folk medicine.

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[Review length: 707 words • Review posted on May 7, 2014]