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.This adaptability of cauterization, how-ever, did not prevent acupuncture from becoming the dominant therapeu-tic technique for both draining and supplementing qi.Cauterization playedonly an insignificant role in the Su wen.Unschuld,Huang Di nei jing 12/2/02 1:34 PM Page 319VIEpilogue: Towarda Comparative HistoricalAnthropology of Medical Thought1.THE SU WEN: DOCUMENT OF A NEW STYLE OF THOUGHTThe texts collected in the Su wen, as heterogeneous and at times contradic-tory as they may be, share at least one central feature.They reflect a delib-erate break with an older tradition and the genesis of an innovative style ofthought that proved to be the seed of a long-lasting new tradition.Briefly,the older tradition comprised a concept of health care on the basis of thefirmly established belief that human illness was caused by demons, ances-tors, and  bugs ; curing, it was believed, could be achieved by placating an-cestors with prayers, by warding off demons with spells and apotropaic sub-stances, and by killing  bugs by means of pharmaceutical drugs.1In stark contrast, the new tradition that evolved from the Su wen refusedto assign numinous agents and bugs such a role.It focused on environmentalconditions, climatic agents, and behavior as causal in the emergence of dis-ease; on the importance of laws, structures, and morale in the explanationof illness; and, in addition to dietetics, on a new technique, acupuncture, inthe prevention and treatment of ailments.The new therapy system evolved after the unification of the empire in 221b.c.and found expression in a large pool of texts written between the sec-ond century b.c.and the first century a.d., which in turn found entranceinto compilations such as the Su wen, the Nan jing, the Ling shu, and the Taisu beginning in the first century a.d.It conveyed images of the human bodyand theories concerning the functioning of the human organism and its var-ious parts that went far beyond the ideas and the knowledge expressed inthe Mawangdui manuscripts and other documents reflecting the status quoof the third and second centuries b.c.Most important, the texts collected in the Su wen and other Han-era com-pilations mark the beginning of medicine in China.Chinese civilization had319Unschuld,Huang Di nei jing 12/2/02 1:34 PM Page 320320 epiloguedeveloped a culture of health care in prehistoric times; the period from thelate Zhou to the late Han saw the emergence of medicine as a new and dis-tinct facet of health care.Medicine in this narrow sense is the attempt to ex-plain disease and health of man solely on the basis of natural laws.Theselaws guarantee a natural order independent of place, time, and human ormetaphysical beings.For the first time,  nature was indeed understood asimpersonal, constant, and rule-governed. 2The Su wen is of pivotal importance as a literary source in examining thesedramatic developments and in asking what stimuli may have prompted them.Based on the early bibliographic history of the text,3 we may hypothesizethat most of the contents of the textus receptus (excluding the one-thirdadded by Wang Bing in the eighth century) was written between the firstcentury b.c.and the second century a.d.That is, while the Su wen itselfdocuments a decisive turning point in ancient Chinese intellectual history,its compilation occurred long after Chinese intellectuals had begun to writedown and make known to others their insights into, their opinions on, andtheir knowledge of the issue of human existence, in regard to both its so-cial and its natural environment.Hence a wealth of sources are available toexamine the concepts of health and illness, the groups in society ascribingto them, the worldviews adhered to by these groups, and the socioeconomicstructures in existence in China before the first century b.c.and in subse-quent centuries.The contents of the Su wen, then, and the literary materials preceding itoffer a unique opportunity to analyze the generation of a new perspectiveon an old human problem: how to interpret illness and how to devise strate-gies to avert situations perceived as threats to one s well-being or even to one slife.The emergence of the new perspective outlined in the Su wen was nonatural event like the eruption of a volcano or the drifting apart of the con-tinents, and it was not a purely intentional act committed by some curiousnaturalists either [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]