Foot qi: History of a Chinese medical disorder.
详细信息
文摘
This is a history of foot qi (jiao qi), an ancient disorder that appears in Chinese documents from at least the sixth century to the present day. This study makes the historiographical argument that we must understand the social and cultural context in which physicians were working in order to understand ancient disease rightly; attention to symptoms and mastery of modern medical knowledge are insufficient. I adopt here the approach that recent historians have developed to analyze modern Western disease categories, discussing foot qi in every period as a combination of both biological and social processes. This has meant observing not only its symptoms in medical literature, but also the social processes that have created and re-created it over the centuries.;Seen through this lens, foot qi makes several important contributions to our understanding of pre-modern Chinese medicine and society. Its early history, centered on the seventh and then the eleventh through twelfth centuries, suggests that relationships between classical physicians and laymen changed significantly during these periods, with classical physicians feeling their authority threatened by popular medical knowledge. Next, changing interpretations of the disorder in the thirteenth century shed light on the development of regional medical theories, as some physicians began to believe that foot qi came in northern and southern types while others cleaved to a more universal understanding of illness. In the same period, classical physicians began to scrutinize dietary causes of disease more carefully, writing about a new form of foot qi that resembled the gout in contemporaneous European sources. Finally, foot qi's modern history, beginning in the late nineteenth century, shows how political and intellectual change first in Japan and then in China helped reduce a complex ancient disease entity to a simpler concept defined by etiology.