Technologies of Trauma: Assessing Wounds and Joining Bones in Late Imperial China
YI-LI WU, RESEARCH CENTRE FOR EAST ASIAN SCIENCES AND TRADITIONS IN MEDICINE, UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER
Thurs. April 3, 2014, 5PM
Green College, Coach House, UBC
An important subfield of traditional Chinese medicine is "injury medicine" (shangke), which historically comprised a wide range of manual and pharmacological techniques for treating traumatic injuries of flesh and bone. This talk will analyze the main changes and innovations in Chinese injury medicine from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, as described in texts of the time. It will also highlight the socio-political factors that shaped this medical corpus, including the problem of wounds caused by corporal punishment, the imperial medical service's promotion of bone setting, and the ways that judicial officials employed injury medicine to help manage cases of criminal assault.
