The Japanese medical historian Reiko Shinno's first book is the most recent addition to the Needham Research Institute Series. Expanding upon the foundation of Joseph Needham's “Science and Civilisation in China” series from the 1950s (now 20 + volumes), since 2002 this series has published twelve books, nearly one every year, covering mostly Chinese medical history (seven) but also Tibetan Medicine in the Contemporary World, the history of Chinese mathematics with Chinese Mathematical Astrology and Reviving Ancient Chinese Mathematics (two), and, more recently, Agriculture and the Food Supply in Premodern Japan: The Place of Rice.
The seven books on Chinese medical history started with Celestial Lancets on the history of acupuncture and moxibustion from classical antiquity to scientific research on acu-moxa therapeutics up to the 1980s. Chronologically, the remaining titles cover much of the early to late medieval period – with Explorations in Daoism: Medicine and Alchemy in Literature, Medieval Chinese Medicine, and The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Northern Song Dynasty, 960–1127 – and the late imperial period with the longue durée narrative of Chinese epidemiology in Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine and the deep-dive analysis in A Chinese Physician: Wang Ji and the Stone Mountain Medical Case Histories of a sixteenth-century physician's medical practice. One book tackles the major twentieth-century political transition from the Republican to Communist period in Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945–1963: Medicine of Revolution.
By focusing on how government institutions in Yuan China (1206–1368) created a more hospitable environment for elite men to practise medicine, The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule addresses a major temporal-thematic lacuna in the history of Chinese medicine not only specifically within this NRI series but also generally in the field. This book significantly restructures Shinno's important dissertation, “Promoting medicine in the Yuan Dynasty (1206–1368): an aspect of Mongol rule in China”, PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2002. It reframes the institutional focus of the original five chapters – on the medical households, medical bureaucracy, medical schools, Temples of the Three Progenitors, and southern Chinese official Yuan Jue (1266–1327) who promoted medicine – into a clearer political chronology that now follows “The Mongol conquest and the new configuration of power, 1206–76” (ch. 2), “The reunification of China, 1276–1300” (ch. 3), and “South Chinese participation in the imperial politics, 1300–68” (ch. 4).
The three core chapters of the book are preceded by a reformulated chapter that situates the southern Chinese official Yuan Jue and his family in their early-fourteenth-century familial, social, and political milieu (ch. 1). This chapter newly sets up the subsequent history of the politics, institutions, and culture of medicine in Mongol-period China through the life experience of Yuan Jue and his family. After situating the chronological narrative of just over 160 years of Chinese medical history within its major political, institutional, and cultural transformations in the following three chapters, the final two thematic chapters focus on “Illnesses and doctors in patients’ eyes” (ch. 5) through the prose and poetry of five Yuan scholars on their available healers and “Medical books and theories” (ch. 6) through physicians’ perspectives and their publications up to Zhu Zhenheng (1282–1358), the major medical synthesizer marking the end of the Mongol period. The book opens with a short prologue that sets up the literature on the political, institutional, and cultural history of the Yuan period with which the author engages, and concludes with a short epilogue that broadly sketches the dénouement during the Ming dynasty of the major Yuan medical institutions detailed in the book. Unfortunately, primary and secondary sources are combined in the bibliography but the index is adequate for easily accessing the main people, terms, and subjects of the book.
The three appendices provide the main empirical data upon which the book's findings are based and are thus useful for other scholars to rely on for further research: 1) the locations and times of construction and renovations of medical temple-schools; 2) the medical administrators listed in the Index to Biographical Materials of Yuan Figures; and 3) the administrators listed in Wei Yilin's Effective Pharmaceutical Recipes by a Hereditary Physician of 1339. The two translations provided in full in the dissertation's appendices are now dispersed into the book's historical narrative. Although Shinno similarly wove arguments about the Yuan's new medical schools and their temples for the Three Progenitors into this book, her earlier analysis remains worth assigning to students as a stand-alone article on how the particular configuration of power under the Mongols created its own medical culture and institutions distinct from the preceding Song and subsequent Ming dynasty (Reiko Shinno, “Medical schools and the temples for the three progenitors in Yuan China: a case of cross-cultural interactions”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 67/1, 2007, 89–133).
The main argument across Shinno's dissertation (2002), article (2007), and book (2016) is that Yuan elites entered medical practice not only because of fewer occupational options, as Robert Hymes persuasively argues (“Not quite gentlemen? Doctors in Sung and Yuan”, Chinese Science 8, 1988, 9–76) but also because under Mongol rule practising medicine became more accessible, viable, and attractive. Furthermore, Chinese elites were not victims of an oppressive Mongol regime but cultural brokers who worked with Mongol rulers and their Central and Western Asian advisers to develop medical schools, the halls of the Three Progenitors within them, and a more robust medical bureaucracy rhetorically aligned with the Song's Lineage of the Way (Daotong). The extant gazetteers, dynastic histories, literati prose and poetry, and medical texts for the period ground these main arguments. Shinno has established a sound political, institutional, and cultural foundation for more in-depth research on the specific social-intellectual milieus of this period's physicians briefly discussed in the final chapter. This book will indeed interest scholars of Chinese medical history, social and cultural history of the Yuan, and medieval global history.
