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Title:
The Sage of Medicine Shrine: Reconstructing Authenticity and Authority of National Medicine in Early Republican China
Abstract:
--As the anti-Chinese medicine discourse and activities escalated into a major controversy across the media and even in debates at the national assembly, the Sage of Medicine Shrine (Yisheng ci醫聖祠) in Nanyang 南陽 of Henan province that celebrate the memory of Zhang Zhongjing (張仲景), arguably the most central authority and demigod of Chinese medicine also faced major challenges and underwent a drastic revival due the collective efforts by a group of physicians and herbal merchants at the time. This preliminary study reconstructs the history of the shrine’s revival by examining the efforts led by Huang Weihan (黃維翰, also, Qian謙, h. Zhuzhai竹斋, 1886-1960), a Republican official and a renowned physician and educator of Chinese medicine from Xi’an and a group of local doctors of Chines medicine and herbal merchants in Nanyang to revive and re-consecrate Zhang Zhongjing as the unassailable sage and authority of Chinese medicine by renovating and maintaining the Sage of Medicine Shrine, by republishing and canonizing medical texts and herbal formula attributed to Zhang, and by forming a national association dedicated to the preservation and promulgation of Chinese medicine as the new National Medicine (guoyi國醫) in Nanyang and beyond. Alongside their efforts to renovate the shrine in honor of Zhang Zhongjing, Huang and his cohorts were also engaged in efforts to modernize and standardize the Chinese medical education and training programs throughout China by legislative activism within the National Committee of Chinese Medicine (Quanguo zhongyi weiyuanhui全國中醫委員會)) under the aegis of the Republican government’s Agency of Public Health (weishengshu衛生署). These legislative efforts succeeded in enlisting support from many Republican government officials and politicians in the central Republican government and the Henan provincial regime. I argued that these efforts led by Huang and his cohorts represented a significant conservative medical nationalist movement aimed at preserving and bolstering the authenticity ad authority of Chinese medical tradition embodied by Zhang Zhongjing on one hand. At the same time, these efforts also constituted a major proactive response to modernize the education and practice of Chinese medicine in a time of great political, cultural and social change in modern China.
