Not quite gentlemen? Doctors in Sung and Yuan.

Who were the doctors in traditional China? What were their social origins? What was their status? Students of the social history of Chinese medicine agree on the importance of these and similar questions, but the work of finding answers is just getting under way. It is already obvious that one cannot expect answers that will be true of all times. places, and levels of society. The need to paint a more complicated picture than the one usual in histories of medicine emerges from the pathbreaking work ·of Joseph Needham, Nathan Sivin, and others.2 But the best recent work on the history of medicine does not reflect a shared understanding of what the major transformations were and when they took place. Needham, in an article that was the first serious approach to the problem in any Western language, saw a gradual transformation in the status of doctors during Chinese history: