Elisabeth Hsu's new book, Pulse Diagnosis in Early Chinese Medicine: The Telling Touch, provides a careful analysis of the sources and thought of Chunyu Yi (fl. 180 b.c.e.), the famous healer from the kingdom of Qi 齊 during the Western Han dynasty (206 b.c.e.–25 c.e.). Chunyu is primarily known through his biography in Shiji 史記 105 of Sima Qian 司馬遷 (c. 145–86 b.c.e.). The work, known as the Biography of the Master of the Granaries (Canggong liezhuan 倉公列傳), has long been of interest to historians for two reasons. To begin with, the Biography quotes a legendary memorial supposedly forwarded to the court by Chunyu's daughter, Tiying 緹縈, after the physician was arrested and transported to the West for punishment in 176 b.c.e. The memorial has been credited with Emperor Wen's decision to rescind mutilatory punishments. In addition, the Biography contains a deposition purportedly given by Chunyu Yi during his imprisonment. The deposition outlines the physician's training and answers to specific queries about his practice and training, as well as twenty-five records of consultation. Taken together, the answer and records of consultation present a rare glimpse of medical diagnosis and treatment in the early empire. In fact, nothing comparable to it survives for another millennium from China.Footnote ¹ As such, the Biography has long been treated as an important source of information about the medical practice and theory of a historical physician.

Hsu is not the first to examine the Canggong liezhuan. The chapter, which also includes the biography of the legendary healer Bian Que 扁鵲, was translated in its entirety and discussed at length by the French scholar R. Bridgman in 1955.Footnote ² Bridgman's study broke new ground, but it was written before the important archaeological discoveries at Zhangjiashan and Mawangdui, which transformed our understanding of the development of Chinese medicine in the last thirty years. Moreover, the chapter has been analyzed at length by the Japanese historian of medicine, Yamada Keiji, in a long article on the transmission of medical knowledge. Nathan Sivin has also examined large portions of the Biography in his seminal paper, “Text and Experience in Classical Chinese Medicine.”Footnote ³ Even so, neither Yamada nor Sivin provided a complete translation of the records of consultation. And while they touched upon aspects of Chinese medical theory, their discussions were largely confined to the practice of initiation. A shorter article by Michael Loewe, published in 1997, examines the activities of the historical Chunyu Yi in relation to the political backdrop of the feudatories of the Western Han.Footnote ⁴ For all of these reasons, the Canggong liezhuan remained a curiously understudied source for the history of Chinese medicine.

In Telling Touch, Hsu furnishes an in-depth analysis of the content and format of the Canggong liezhuan. The book is divided into three parts, each of which is further subdivided into chapters. Part One, “Framing the Field,” provides a general orientation to the state of the field and the broader context of early Chinese medical practice and theory. After situating the reader in the fields of history, anthropology, and classical philology, Hsu gives an overview of the major thematics of the book. She examines the role of tactility in diagnosis, competing conceptions of the body, and theories of illness etiology. She then proceeds to offer a short literature review and a survey of conceptions of the body in the Warring States period, the latter of which is replete with a discussion of key terms in the Chinese medical tradition.

Part Two, “The Memoir of Chunyu Yi in Shi ji 105,” focuses on the Canggong liezhuan. It opens with an outline of the memoir, a translation, an overview of important commentaries to the work, and a map of Chunyu Yi's movements as recorded in the Canggong liezhuan. Here, Hsu provides us with a close reading of the language and structure of the text, offering a new perspective on the historical process by which the Canggong liezhuan took shape. For years, the deposition—the portion of the Canggong liezhuan that would seem to be narrated through Chunyu's own voice—has long been assumed to represent a factual record of medical training. As Lu Gwei-djen and Joseph Needham put it in Celestial Lancets, the deposition provides us with a “precious gift” of the thoughts, knowledge, and practice of a historical physician.Footnote ⁵ As Michael Loewe points out, the language of the deposition is inelegant, even rough. And indeed, a casual perusal of the text reveals the awkward phraseology and formulaic structure more characteristic of the bureaucrat than the Grand Historian.Footnote ⁶

For all of its commonsense appeal, the conventional view falters upon closer examination, as Hsu points out. Certain elements in the deposition draw out problems with current assumptions about the deposition's provenance. Granted, some parts might have dated as early as 176, the year in which Chunyu was reportedly arrested. Yet, as Loewe realizes, much of the third part of the deposition (which sets forth Chunyu's answers to official queries) must have been written decades after the arrest. This is because some of the events mentioned in the deposition postdate his arrest by as much as two decades, and comments made by the physician disclose knowledge of events that occurred much later.Footnote ⁷ For Hsu, such discrepancies are telling; they suggest that Chunyu's authorship of the deposition is less than certain. More likely, she argues, is the scenario that the deposition—like so many other early Chinese texts—was a composite. As with other chapters, Sima Qian drew from a range of heterogeneous sources, some of which were perhaps written by the historical Chunyu Yi, but others most likely not. To put it somewhat baldly, we should not presume that the whole of the deposition represented Chunyu's voice, nor should we take it for granted that the historical Chunyu Yi was anything like the persona found in the Historical Records.Footnote ⁸

Part Three, “Translation and Interpretation of the Medical Case Histories 1–10 in the Memoir of Chunyu Yi,” sets forth an annotated translation and close analysis of the language, structure, and content of the first ten records of consultation. Hsu's choice of the first ten cases builds off her analysis in Part Two. According to her, it is the first ten records, rather than the last fifteen, that provide the most untarnished view of medical practice in Chunyu's own time (presumably the second century b.c.e.). Her assessment is based on the large degree of consistency that she sees across the first ten cases, as well as observed similarities to manuscripts excavated from second-century sites.Footnote ⁹ In this part, every line of the first ten records is dissected in detail, with earlier translations and analyses by earlier scholars contrasted with Hsu's readings. Terms for various disorders are furthermore examined against the corpus of medical texts, including the Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic (Huangdi neijing皇帝內經) and excavated medical manuscripts. Quotations from learned texts are moreover unpacked and compared against received texts. This is what Hsu calls “text structure semantics.” According to Hsu, the key to making sense of this difficult text is the formulaic quality of the records of consultation, a method that assumes that “linguistically marked clauses concern themes that the author(s)/editor(s) of a text consider important.”Footnote ¹⁰ Here, close attention is made to the structure of the text and to semantics. Also included by Hsu are troublesome passages: passages that contain signs of editorial interpolations or corruption, such as anachronisms found in later canonical sources.Footnote ¹¹

Without a doubt, Hsu makes a valuable contribution to the field of the history of medicine in Telling Touch. The author is to be commended for tackling one of the most difficult texts on early Chinese medicine. In contrast to other received sources, the Canggong liezhuan is written in a rough idiom. Close parallels in later canonical sources are moreover rare, making the interpretation of the text a difficult endeavor. Little wonder, then, that traditional and modern commentaries on the text are comparatively rare. For this reason, the author has taken great pains to provide a thorough reading and interpretation of the text. The impression one has, in fact, is that the author left no commentarial or philological stone unturned. In addition, Hsu deserves great credit for providing competing interpretations of difficult passages, and for alerting readers to the limitations of scholarly knowledge. Finally, the author should be praised for her efforts to bring insights from the fields of medical anthropology and literature to bear on the analysis of early Chinese texts. All this offers a contrast to the current state of the field; students of early Chinese history are too often content with being confined to their own enclave, and it is rare to see a scholar make use of insights generated in other disciplines. An anthropologist originally by training, Hsu bucks the usual trend by drawing upon fieldwork experience and familiarity with social theorists. In addition, she has ventured into the field of literary analysis, paying meticulous attention to the structure and narratological features of texts.

Aside from its methodological virtues, Telling Touch also deserves praise for its concrete findings. Hsu's rigorous re-reading of the Canggong liezhuan has revealed a messier story about the history of a text often assumed to be one of China's first medical case histories. Indeed, by showing that the deposition is a multi-vocalic and heterogeneous text, Hsu casts doubt on the conventional wisdom, which has assumed that Chunyu Yi was an historical personage. To put it differently, Hsu's interpretation allows us to see that Chunyu Yi (like most other early personas in the classical medical tradition) was a bricolage, one assembled from earlier textual resources, myths, and repertoires.

If I were to offer any criticism of Telling Touch, it is that I think that Hsu, in her final analysis, does not press her excellent insights far enough. Having deconstructed the conventional wisdom about the relationship between the persona found in the Canggong liezhuan and the historical figure (if he ever existed at all), Hsu then proceeds to suggest that the first ten records of consultation were by Chunyu Yi himself. No doubt, such a move will be familiar to students of early Chinese texts. We find a similar approach undertaken in the Original Analects of Bruce and Taeko Brooks, where we also see an effort to strip away layers of commentary and interpolation, thereby locating the authentic core of the master's teaching.Footnote ¹² While Hsu is more careful to distance herself from the search for the doctrines of a single historical figure, her efforts to reveal a second-century b.c.e. core to the Canggong liezhuan—one that can be unearthed by peeling away strata of interjections and emendations introduced by Sima Qian in the first century and later editors—also raise questions.Footnote ¹³ Does it make sense to think of the history of Chinese medicine in terms of successive layers of strata? Such a stance assumes that Chinese medical theory developed in terms of neat stages, whereby new ideas displaced older ones. Such a stance seems unwarranted in light of recent discussions by He Zhiguo and Vivienne Lo, who show us convincingly that competing visions of the body of disparate age can be found in texts and model representations of the body from the same period.Footnote ¹⁴ And indeed, the Neijing corpus, which is famous for its lack of theoretical coherence, serves as a prime case in point. As is well known, the Neijing represents a compilation of works from different eras and incorporates not only competing, but also conflicting, understandings of the body.Footnote ¹⁵

Such critiques, however, should not detract from Hsu's accomplishments. Through her analysis of a difficult and understudied text, Hsu has contributed to the store of knowledge about the development of acupuncture. And by offering a meticulous, annotated translation of the Canggong liezhuan, she has moreover made an important source in the Chinese medical tradition available to a broader audience of scholars.