University College London

Graduate Student, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine

About

People access many kinds of knowledge to understand and respond to bodily experience - how do they choose among them?

My work concerns medical practice and healing by Daoists throughout the history of Daoism, and is informed by my clinical experience as a practitioner of Chinese medicine, and by fieldwork in modern temples.  I understand healing systems to be created first through individuals' habitual choices from among a multiplicity of systems, and that this is where the rubber of individual experience meets the road of culture, and the two shape each other.  Insofar as these choices are consistently negotiated, adopted, and ratified by other individuals and communities, those systems survive.  In my work I try to avoid long duree claims about Daoism in toto, and approach case-studies in specific periods.  I am most interested in individuals' epistemic priorities as they choose from existing medical strategies to form their own repertoire(s).

My current project concerns the division of labour between medicine and religion in China that occurs over the first 600 years CE, as seen in diverse media: esoteric oral transmissions, scriptures, biographies, medical texts, recipe collections, pharmacopœia, divine revelations, encyclopædias and imperial bibliographies.  My dissertation describes the therapeutic practices in the Zhen'gao 真誥 HY 1010, a collection of 4th century spirit-revelations. On the one hand I contextualise them synchronically within the therapeutic market of ideas and practices, and on the other, demonstrate how the diachronically different textual layers within the text reflect changing institutional practices and ideals concerning salvation and therapy.  By considering the different textual forms, the historical contexts (geographic, sectarian, political, epidemiological, personal histories of illness) and the personal goals of the writers/editors I show how they combine to shape differing notions about the convergence or divergence of material and spirit-based discourses of therapy.  Whether the recipes are transmitted within esoteric technical lineages, copied down into personal diaries of divine revelations, or contained in imperially-sponsored encyclopedias of Daoist practice greatly affects the choices of the master/priest/ editor. 

Using this text as a basis for social history, I then track the institutionalised convergence or divergence of concepts of medicine and religion in different Daoist thinkers’ writings, imperial bibliographies and different textual layers of the Daoist canon.  This enables me to draw larger conclusions about sea-changes in Chinese medieval thought about selfhood, salvation and the body.

As such, I am interested more broadly in religious studies, medical anthropology, medical history, Chinese medicine, phenomenology of the body, Chinese history, and Chinese historical geography.

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