Plurality in Qing Imperial Medicine: Examining Institutional Formations beyond the Imperial Medical Bureau

Aricanli, Sare

Abstract

This article illustrates the value of using the lens of institutional history to study imperial medicine. Identifying and incorporating a range of organizations and posts into the narrative of imperial medicine in eighteenth-century China shows the breadth of medical activity during this time. The most familiar institution of imperial medicine is the Imperial Medical Bureau, and this study argues that we can greatly benefit from including the history of other formations such as the Imperial Pharmacy and the Ministry of Imperial Stables, Herds, and Carriages. Such an outlook reveals the overlapping spheres of institutions, practitioners, and medicinals between human and equine medicine, implies that ethnicity may have been a factor in the organization of medicine, and points to a wider range of medical practitioners and patients within the imperial realm. Furthermore, multiplicity did not only exist among institutions and practitioners, but also on the linguistic level, as evidenced by the divergence in the meaning of some Manchu and Chinese terminology. Finally, these pluralities suggest that an understanding of imperial medicine as being limited to the Imperial Medical Bureau greatly underestimates the diversity of institutions, posts, ethnicities, and languages within the eighteenth-century Chinese imperial medical world.

Citation

Aricanli, S. (2014). Plurality in Qing Imperial Medicine: Examining Institutional Formations beyond the Imperial Medical Bureau. Asia Pacific: perspectives (San Francisco, Calif.), 12(1), 61-83

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Online Publication Date: Nov 30, 2013
• Publication Date: 2014
• Deposit Date: Sep 12, 2014
• Journal: Asia Pacific: Perspectives
• Publisher: University of San Francisco
• Volume: 12
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 61-83
• Publisher URL: https://www.usfca.edu/center-asia-pacific/perspectives/v12n1