Organizer: T. J. Hinrichs, Harvard University
Chair: Francesca Bray, University of California, Santa Barbara
Discussant: Charlotte Furth, University of Southern California
"Infestation" is Michel Strickmann's translation for zhu, a disease category usually translated as "demonic possession." The English term "infestation," evoking the inhabiting or overrunning of places with vermin or bodies with parasites, is suggestive of the scope and nature of these phenomena. In zhu, the infesting agencies often inhabit the clothing, utensils, and rooms of the sick, as well as their bodies, and could infest the well by contact. We extend the term "infestation" beyond the zhu category, to related phenomena involving demons and "creatures" or "insects" (chong), categories that were not always distinct. For example, chong were often the forms in which infesting demons manifested upon treatment, and the source from which demonic gu, another object of exorcistic and medical treatment, was generated.
Infestations were an important problem for Chinese healers. Their contagious and demonic aspects sometimes provoked large-scale social responses, including the abandonment of stricken relatives and even whole villages, religious conversion, and witch hunt-like panics over gu cultivation.
Historians have often looked at demonic and chong infestations as marginal phenomena-a subject for ghost stories, or stand-ins for parasitic, contagious, or mental diseases. In emphasizing Yin-Yang/Five Phases functional theory, many histories of Chinese medicine have neglected infestatious diseases, obscuring the diversity and eclecticism of traditional Chinese medical practices. This panel addresses some major reworkings of these disease categories and changing approaches in therapy and social response, primarily from a medical perspective, but drawing from a variety of non-medical sources as well.
Infestatious Diseases in the Han Dynasty
Elisabeth Hsu, University of Cambridge
In the second part of the 105th chapter of the Shiji, the Canggong zhuan, twenty-five medical case histories report on complaints, diagnosis, prognosis, etiology, and treatment of a wide variety of diseases, including infestatious diseases. This paper will compare the diagnosis and treatment of chong infestations and jia conglomerations in the Canggong zhuan with that in the Mawangdui medical manuscripts, and in the Neijing. It will also examine the incorporation of those diseases into the medicine of systematic correspondences.
The Gu, the Doctor, and the Judge
Frederic Obringer, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
One of the most fascinating and outstanding features of the so-called infestatious diseases (zhubing) is their complex relations with various medical, social, and legal aspects, throughout Chinese history. We know, for example, that the gu was a kind of "witchcraft" (or "sorcery," since its arts to make poison in a magical way could be learned by anyone), a demonic disease with very precisely described symptoms (see Zhubing yuanhou lun A.D. 610), as well as a category of condemned practices included in the Code.
In this paper, I shall look at the relation between the medical description of zhu diseases and the practices designated as "deviant ways" (zuodao) in legal literature. Gu, to take the same example, was mentioned and categorized in the Wei Code, in the Tang Code of A.D. 653 under the "Ten Abominations" (shie), as well as in treatises of forensic medical practice such as the Xiyuan lu, completed in the thirteenth century by Song Ci, and the Wuyuan lu completed by Wang Yu in A.D. 1308. Thus, the "legal" point of view was of some importance in the construction of zhu diseases as social representations.
The Reworking of Infestation and Contagion in the Song Period
T. J. Hinrichs, Harvard University
In pre-Song writings and practices surrounding epidemics, it is apparent that for most people epidemics involved the infestation of bodies and space by demonic agents, and that these agents were "contagious," passing from infested bodies, objects, and places to the uninfested. While a few pre-Song writers challenged the morality and deplored the socially disruptive consequences of practices such as the avoidance of infested people and places, very few extended their critique to the views of disease involved in these practices. In the Song period, the views of disease as contagious and infestatious became the focus of more extensive literati critique as well as of concrete official policies aimed at "transforming" the customs of the south.
In medicine, approaches to and acceptance of infestation and contagion changed markedly in the Song as well. In comparing Song nosological and prescription texts to those of earlier periods, we see significant shifts in the description of infestation and contagion, and in the categorization of related diseases. In this paper, I discuss these changes in relation to the development of wuyun liuqi theories in medicine and their application to epidemic diseases, as well as to broader cultural changes.
Worms or Germs? The Multiple Meanings of "Consumption" in Republican
China
Bridie Andrews, University of Cambridge
Rendering foreign technical terms into Chinese has long presented translators with difficult choices. Mid-nineteenth century western medical missionaries often adapted Chinese disease terminology, whereas Japanese translators usually coined new terms. The scientism of the Republican era notwithstanding, several translators and popularizers of western medicine chose to equate "tuberculosis" (a western-medical disease entity) with "consumption" (laozhai), a well-documented ailment within the Chinese medical tradition. In making this equation, they deliberately identified the "worms of consumption" (laochong), with the tuberculosis bacilli first identified by Koch in the West. These "worms" were thought to devour the victim's viscera, and after death, to fly into subsequent victims' bodies. This paper explores the cultural consequences of this and other, similarly multivalent translation strategies in the creation of multiple understandings of disease identity and causation in Republican China.