Novel Medicine

Groundbreaking. . . . Explores not only the textual interplay of novel medicine and medical fiction, but also their roles as important literary genres in disseminating vernacular knowledge about health, illness, healing, and the body.

Novel Medicine is an innovative comparison of medical lore and fictional practice. . . . This is an important study, one that should be read by anyone seriously interested in late imperial Chinese culture; it demonstrates the interactions between realms of knowledge that modern specialized fields so easily overlook.

Like an early Chinese novel, Andrew Schonebaum’s book Novel Medicine both informs and titillates. . . . This is innovative scholarship. . . . Schonebaum’s expansive conception and meticulous research make Novel Medicine an eye-opening read, one that I particularly recommend to historians of medicine and of gender and sexuality.

Offers exciting new literary and historical methods for unraveling the many intersections between medicine and literature that should be of great interest to readers engaged with the medical humanities, the cultural history of medicine, and late imperial Chinese history.

This book is a highly original contribution to the scholarship on traditional Chinese fiction. I very much hope that students of traditional Chinese medicine (and of the introduction of Western medicine into China) will find this work equally fascinating and enlightening.

Andrew Schonebaum has written an insightful and original historical work on popular medicine and literature in late imperial China.

Novel Medicine offers an intriguing opportunity to reorient the study of Chinese medical history toward a broader categorization of ‘medical texts,’ and therefore a more accurate understanding of late imperial worldviews and medical beliefs. . . . Schonebaum’s fascinating subject matter provides a thoroughly engaging read.

Straddling the lines between fields like Chinese literature, medical history, and even gender studies, Novel Medicine is eye-opening in its interdisciplinary rigor.

The genius of this book is to take what appears to be three disparate realms—healing/medicine, literature, and religion—and demonstrate that they shared a common ‘literary logic.’ The world before the introduction of modern science and bio-medicine is thus revealed to be wrought of a surprising and equally valid common sense. In focusing on recycling, quotations, and oblique references among familiar and obscure texts, Schonebaum has painted a dynamic picture of vernacular knowledge on the eve of China’s modernity.

Novel Medicine is a highly provocative book. Schonebaum seeks to deal with the discourse of illness as reflected by late imperial and early modern literary masterpieces. His research examines a wide range of subjects, from narrative literature to cultural history, and from medicine as an episteme and medicine as a social institution. Schonebaum particularly focuses on the circulation of infectious diseases as a point of reference to the changing notion of body, disease, hygiene, medical technology, and socioeconomic dynamics of early modern China. This is a groundbreaking work.

Novel Medicine, by bringing together disparate material in a novel way, sheds new and interesting light on traditional Chinese medicine, vernacular literature, and society.