Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine by Hilary A. Smith (review)

Abstract

Hilary A. Smith’s Forgotten Disease: Illnesses Transformed in Chinese Medicine is an extraordinary book, replete with rich and imaginative story telling and insightful analyses of materials spanning different periods and national traditions. Forgotten Disease also intervenes in a key debate among historians of Chinese medicine. Since some readers may be unfamiliar with this debate, it would be useful to situate Smith’s contribution within its historiography. Exemplified by the writings of scientists, such as Joseph Needham in his Science and Civilisation project, the older approach narrates—or, better still, measures—the history of medicine from the perspective of modern Western biomedicine.1 It privileges modern biomedical disease categories over premodern or non-Western understandings of nature and treats both premodern and non-Western understandings of the human body as incomplete or more primitive versions of science. This framework also conflates Chinese terminology for illness with modern disease categories, leading scholars to identify mafeng 麻瘋 as leprosy and nüe 瘧 as malaria. Since the 1990s, this approach has come under attack for its anachronism and its lack of sensitivity to the different ways that historical actors experienced and made sense of illness. Under the influence of postmodernism, the next generation disengages from modern biomedicine, emphasizing the incommensurability between Chinese and Western understandings of illness and the human body. Such an approach, epitomized by Shigehisa Kuriyama’s The Expressiveness of the Body and Ted Kaptchuk’s The Web That Has No Weaver, has prompted the next generation of historians to emphasize the alterity of classical Chinese understandings of illness.2 In this framework, premodern Chinese conceptions of the body and of illness could not be reduced to