Concepts of Disease in East Asia

Abstract

In the inscriptions that record the divinations of Shang dynasty China (eighteenth to eleventh centuries B.C.), we find a number of diagnostic queries like this: “Divining this tooth affliction. Should we hold a festival for Fuyi?” Fuyi refers to a Shang ancestor, and the concern about a propitiatory festival reflects the belief, frequently voiced in the oracles, that sickness arises from the anger and envy of ancestors toward their descendants (Hu 1944; Miyashita 1959). If the welfare of the dead depended on the rituals of the living, the resentments of the dead were something to which the living remained ceaselessly vulnerable. Disease thus first appears in China embodied in dangerous others, as a menace from without. After the Shang dynasty, the focus of concern would broaden and shift from disgruntled ancestors to parasites and poisons, demons and witchcraft spells. But whomever or whatever the Chinese accused of inspiring sickness, the defining feature of the earliest conceptions of disease was their independence from a conception of the body. In other words, the peculiarities of an individual’s somatic condition were no more relevant to understanding a fever or a toothache than they were for explaining why one’s crops were destroyed in a storm. The fact that an affliction happened to attack the body was incidental. The vengeful spirits that brought sickness could just as easily have inflicted drought and famine. This accounts in part for why a collection of cures such as the Wushier bing fang (Recipes for fifty-two ailments) of the late third century B.C. tells us so much, on the one hand, about noxious demons and the techniques for exorcizing them and teaches us so little, on the other hand, about the afflicted body itself (Harper 1982).

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