Essential Subtleties on the Silver Sea: The Yin-Hai Jing-Wei: A Chinese Classic on Ophthalmology (Volume 38) (Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520080580 ISBN 13: 9780520080584

Publisher: University of California Press, 1999

Synopsis

Here is the first translation into English of the complete Yin-Hai Jing-Wei, a classic fifteenth-century text on Chinese ophthalmology. As one of the few original manuscripts on traditional Chinese medicine translated into a Western language, this work offers an unprecedented view of the practice of medicine, and specifically eye care, in premodern China. Superbly rendered from the classical Chinese and extensively annotated by Paul U. Unschuld and Jürgen Kovacs, the text provides detailed descriptions of the etiology, symptomatology, and therapy of every eye disease known to fifteenth-century Chinese practitioners. The translators' introduction also provides the first in-depth analysis of the development of this specialty within Chinese medicine. As a source for comparative studies of Chinese and Western medicine and numerous other issues in the history of medicine and Chinese thought, the Yin-Hai Jing-Wei has no equal in the Western world.

About this title

About the Author

Paul U. Unschuld is Director of the Institute of the History of Medicine, Munich University, and author of Nan-ching: The Classic of Difficult Issues (California, 1986), Medicine in China: A History of Pharmaceutics (California, 1985) and (California, 1985). Jürgen Kovacs, an ophthalmologist, is Research Fellow at the Institute of the History of Medicine, Munich University.

From the Back Cover

"A major contribution to ophthalmology. . . . The scholarship is of the highest standard. The translation is a model of philological precision."―Donald Harper, University of Arizona

From the Inside Flap

"A major contribution to ophthalmology. . . . The scholarship is of the highest standard. The translation is a model of philological precision."—Donald Harper, University of Arizona

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Essential Subtleties on the Silver Sea: The Yin-Hai Jing-Wei: A Chinese Classic on Ophthalmology

By Jrgen Kovacs and Paul U. Unschuld, translated from the Chinese and annotated by

University of California Press

Copyright 1999 Jrgen Kovacs and Paul U. Unschuld, translated from the Chinese and annotated by
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520080580
Introduction

I.1
The Yin-Hai Jing-Wei

No organ is comparable to the eye in its importance as a link between man and his environment. To be deaf, or to have lost dermal sensitivitysuch handicaps are severe and create a definite obstacle to the perception of the world we live in. When sounds do not reach us, and when hot and cold, soft and hard, smooth and rough cannot be distinguished, a significant segment of all the stimuli and impressions reaching us from our environment, tying us to our environment, and permitting us orientation in our environment is lost forever. Similarly, to be mute is more than merely to have a silenced voice; muteness is a barrier closing one of the natural outlets of our mind to express our thoughts and to convey our sentiments. Loss of a sense organ and loss of voice entail invisible but nevertheless strict and lifelong incarceration; far-reaching isolation is the result.

No such impairment, though, equals blindness. With our eyesight destroyed, our communication with the social and physical world is interrupted in two ways. We know each other from our eyes; to disguise us it is sufficient to mask our eyes. Also, our intangible characteristics are most closely associated by our fellow human beings with signals read from our eyes. In our assessment of another person's character and emotions, we depend on a feeling of being able to look into this person, and this feeling is possible only as long as the eyes of our counterpart are "alive," as long as they appear to reflect internal assets. Once the eyes are blinded, it is as if an entry into the mind and nature of a counterpart has been closed.

If, therefore, "dead eyes" create a distance between the blind and the seeing from the perspective of the latter, the same is true, but much more intensely, for the blind person and that person's perception of the world. Both this world, andin literate civilizationsthe written media relating

its description, analysis, and meaning, remain hidden to the blind, remain even physically inaccessible, if there is no help from those who see acting as interpreters or guides to enable movement, mentally and physically. And even if interpreters who tell of the world and guides who lead one through the world are available, such assistance remains of a very limited valueit cannot bridge the gap.

Blindness is not a cultural construct. Blindness is a fact with identical primary consequences all around the world. Blindness may happenout of accident or through an anyone illnessto anywhere. Human reaction to blindness, or to impending blindness, though, is culturally conditioned, as are many of the causes leading to blindness. Hence, in a cross-cultural comparison, a question of interest to the anthropologist is whether blindness, and the threat to turn blind, have received similar attention in different cultures, and whether the illnesses of the eye, as the physical organ whose faculties are involved here, have been viewed with similar attention in the medical traditions of such seemingly separate and idiosyncratic culture spheres as are Europe and China. After all, literacy predated medicine in the East and in the West, and the very authors compiling medical literature could have read and written their texts without ears, or voice, but hardly without eyes.

With the present study, we wish to introduce a major text from the history of traditional Chinese ophthalmology to a Western readership. This text, the Yin-hai jing-wei   (lit., "Essential subtleties on the silver sea"),1 traditionally ascribed to Sun Si-miao  (581682?), was most likely compiled from different sources in the fourteenth or fifteenth century (a detailed discussion of these dates will follow below). It combines lengthy theoretical passages with extensive sections recommending pharmaceutical prescriptions and other means of therapy; its contents permit an analysis of the conceptualization of eye afflictions and of the physiology of the healthy eye in traditional Chinese medicine, and it offers insights into foreign (here Indian) influences on health care in China. On a meta-level, the Yin-hai jing-wei is an example of an outstanding text from the realm of distinct specialties within traditional Chinese medicine. To open its contents to an audience that is separated from the culture and the author(s) who produced these contentsnot only by vast geographical distances but also by a time span of more than half a millenniumrequires a thorough discussion of the methodology chosen and the terminology to be adopted.

Traditional Chinese medicine is a cultural product that was never static or homogeneous. Traditional Chinese medicine consists of many historical layers and ideological traditions, and while the Yin-hai jing-wei itself reflects this heterogeneity to a certain degree, it should be seen as one littlealbeit importantpiece in that slowly unfolding mosaic of thoughts and practices which only in its entirety may be called traditional Chinese medicine. It is

our task as medical historians, through translating and analyzing ancient Chinese medical texts, to permit, or at least strive to permit, unprejudiced access to a field of data the major part of which will remain hidden from our eyes for a long time to come.

Given the fact, though, that almost the entire secondary literature on Chinese medicine published in the West over the past two decades was written with an eye to providing clinical information by authors perceiving a need to present, under the name of "Chinese medicine," approaches to health care and conceptualizations of illness either not existing or neglected in Western medicine, it is hardly surprising that this literature has been quite selective.

Fields such as pediatrics or ophthalmology have not been treated adequately in recent accounts of "Chinese medicine." Where guiding interests aim at a presentation of a "Chinese medicine" that fulfills the two criteria of being an alternative to so-called Western medicine and, at the same time, of remaining within realms of thought that are neither absurd nor metaphysical nor outright disproven and obsolete if judged from a contemporary scientific perspective, traditional Chinese medical specialties, such as ophthalmology or pediatrics, appearat least on first glancerather unappealing, and they have been widely neglected until recently.

The Yin-hai jing-wei offers, as we shall see below, an approach toward understanding and curing eye disorders that makes ophthalmology, apart from its surgical components, appearfrom a twentieth-century perspectiveas a subspecialty within internal medicine rather than as a distinct specialty within medicine. Regardless of the stimuli an in-depth examination of this approach may exert on clinical ophthalmology in the future, the Yin-hai jing-wei is an important historical document. A familiarity with its contents will contribute to the gradual unveiling of the complete mosaic of traditional Chinese medicine.

Continues...

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520080580
• ISBN 13: 9780520080584
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 525