This book is the first comprehensive account of the history of Chinese medicine to be written in English in a generation. By this virtue alone, TJ Hinrichs and Linda L. Barnes—and the authors they have brought together—have made a significant contribution to the field. This accessible and informative volume will be of interest to a wide range of scholars, students, Chinese medical practitioners, and general readers.

The book's contents are divided chronologically, with chapters covering the pre-imperial, Han, medieval, Song-Jin, Yuan-Ming, Qing, Republic of China, and People's Republic of China eras, as well as contemporary Chinese medicine in the United States and worldwide. The chapters are written by leading scholars of the respective periods, including Constance A. Cook, Vivienne Lo, Fan Ka-wai, Angela Ki Che Leung, Yi-Li Wu, Bridie J. Andrews, Volker Scheid, and the two editors themselves. The format of the book ensures that one can read (or assign) any one chapter as a self-contained overview of the main developments in medicine during a given era of history. In almost all cases, the authors offer extensive citations of the relevant scholarship and primary sources, providing numerous starting points for scholars who wish to continue their investigation of specific topics. At the same time, the authors incorporate summaries of political, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual developments that are helpful for readers unfamiliar with Chinese history who wish to gain a sense of the larger historical context for medical thought and practice. This balance between informing the specialist and accommodating the neophyte is one of the chief strengths of the book.

Throughout the book, the editors have interspersed fifty-two short text boxes or sidebars written by a wide range of scholars both well known in the field and tangential to it. Introducing such eclectic topics as dream analysis, Daoist self-cultivation, the impact of Arabic medicine, healing in vernacular fiction, Viagra in China, Iraqi acupuncture, and taiji in the United States, these sections will provide even a seasoned scholar of Chinese medical history with surprising, often tantalizing, new insights. The inclusion of such a wide range of topics is made possible by the book's commitment to examining the history of Chinese healing from the perspective of not only the physicians and the writers of authoritative medical texts, but also a whole range of adepts, “shamans,” religious specialists, and other popular healers. The editors explain in the introduction that the expansion of their purview beyond government bureaus, medical officials, and literati physicians to include this wider range of practitioners necessitated the rethinking of distinctions such as sacred/secular, science/religion, traditional/modern, as well as conventional sectarian categories, and even the notion of “China” itself. While the authors spend the majority of their allotted space discussing developments in the thought and practice of acupuncture, moxibustion, pharmacology, and other aspects of mainstream Chinese medicine, the book successfully draws attention to the porousness of the boundaries around these traditions, and the significant influences of religion, foreign cultures, popular culture, and other bodies of knowledge on the ideas and practices of Chinese medicine.

Since a balanced review must draw attention to a book's weaknesses as well as to its strengths, it is incumbent upon me to mention a few shortcomings in the production of the volume. In the first place, although it is commendable that this affordable publication contains as many as seventy-six photos and fourteen illustrations (including maps), the subtitle of the volume, “An Illustrated History,” raises expectations of high-quality, full-color reproductions that the images do not satisfy. Another point to mention is the volume's disproportionate emphasis on the modern and contemporary eras. Roughly half its pages are dedicated to the post-imperial period, meaning that the other half of the book covers the preceding centuries in far less detail. Fan Ka-wai's chapter on the medieval era, for example, labors to summarize almost 700 years of medical history in only sixteen pages of body text.

These observations notwithstanding, this reviewer's evaluation of the authors’ contributions and of Hinrichs's and Barnes's editorial work is overwhelmingly positive. Their book is notable as a collective statement of the interests and approaches of a new generation of scholars. Readers who have not been following recent developments in the history of Chinese medicine will find that it is no longer dominated by the eminent scholars who were the most influential voices in the 1980s, such as Joseph Needham, Nathan Sivin, Paul Unschuld, and Arthur Kleinman. Rather, while the introduction to the volume explicitly honors those individuals as trailblazers, and while virtually every page in the volume implicitly engages with their foundational scholarship, the book makes clear that the field has grown significantly in recent years.

In their attention to a wide spectrum of healing practices, their questioning of categories and master narratives, and their richly contextualized approach to their material, the contributors to this project engage fruitfully with many current trends in the history of medicine and make connections with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Consequently, the book will help to integrate the study of the history of Chinese medicine into undergraduate or graduate courses in East Asian history, anthropology, and gender studies, as well as into courses on the history of medicine. Programs in Oriental medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, and even medical humanities are also likely to welcome this book into their curricula, insofar as it introduces a range of scholarly perspectives on Chinese medicine in a manner that is accessible and not forbiddingly theoretical. Scholars and students in all of these disciplines will find this book to be an unparalleled entry point to the exciting developments in the scholarly exploration of Chinese medicine and a valuable resource for further study.