Traditional Chinese Medicine
An almost complete afterworld household, closed in 167 B.C., was unearthed from the now-well-known Ma-wang-tui site near Ch’ang-sha in Hunan between 1972 and 1974. This tomb of a noble family had been equipped with virtually everything a deceased person was thought to need in his or her subsequent existence, including 14 manuscripts on various aspects of health care.
These manuscripts marked the beginning of documented Chinese medicine and revealed that it was on the verge of breaking away from metaphysical health care. Thus, we may assume that they also reflected the earliest phase in the development of medicine in China, that is, the development of a system of health care beliefs and practices focusing specifically on the illnesses of the human mind and body rather than on human social and individual existence as a whole.The tomb dates from a period between the second century B.C. and the first century A.D., when Chinese medicine took on its basic shape. This appears to have been a quite dynamic era. As early as the first century, various schools of medical thought had been founded and had already produced diverging ideas. These were compiled under the name of the mythical Yellow Emperor and have become the classic scripture of traditional Chinese medicine, that is, the Huang-ti nei-ching (The inner classic of the Yellow Emperor).
An attempt at systematizing the rather heterogeneous contents of the Huang-ti nei-ching, and at drawing diagnostic and clinical conclusions from an assumed circulation of vapors in the human body, resulted in the second major literary work of Chinese medicine, the Nan-ching, probably of the first century A.D. This work is also of unknown authorship and was subsequently associated with an earlier (about the sixth century B.C.) semilegendary itinerant physician named Pien Ch’io.
Pharmaceutical knowledge was recorded with astonishing sophistication in a collection of prescriptions found among the Ma-wang-tui scripts named Wu-shih-erh ping fang (Prescriptions against 52 ailments) by modern researchers. At about the time of the compilation of the Nan-ching (and coinciding with the appearance of the materia medica of Dioscorides in A.D. 65 in the West), Chinese pharmaceutical knowledge found its own literary form when the first Chinese herbal was compiled, which became known by the title Shen-nung pen-ts’ao ching (The divine husbandman’s classic on materia medica). Its real author is unknown, and like the other works discussed, this classic was linked to a mythical culture hero, Shen-nung, who is also credited with the development of agriculture and markets as well as with the establishment of drug lore.