英文摘要 |
This article investigates extant accounts of treating zhang (瘴 “miasma”) disorders in Song dynasty Lingnan 嶺南, a region largely encompassing presentday Guangdong province, Guangxi province and Hainan island at that time, and mainly concerns how authors enhanced the trustworthiness of these accounts. Authors of pre-Southern Song medical literature who mentioned prescription strategies for treating zhang for the most part stressed the fact that the recipes collected in their works were tested and proven effective. This was their primary means of establishing trustworthiness. By contrast, the majority of Southern Song authors writing about zhang medicine sought to render their claims more authoritative by including details drawn from their own experience of the environment and of cases they had treated in Lingnan, adopting what I call a “personally-verified approach.” There is a significant concurrence between the increasing emphasis by authors of Song formularies (fangshu 方書) and jottings (biji 筆記) on documenting particularities they had experienced and observed in specifi places, and the emergence of writing based on authors’ own experiences and observations of regional features in Southern Song zhang medicine. In formularies, this trend was a response to a growing expectation for individual particularities to be taken into account, and served as a new criterion among educated readers for assessing the reliability of formularies. Jottings, a literary form whose popularity soared in the Southern Song, also highlighted knowledge acquired by authors through first-hand observation and from conversations. Accounts of zhang texts containing information about Lingnan were a popular topic of conversation at social occasions of the day, a fact which also fits our general understanding of the social implications of jottings, and an example of how oral discourse and literature were interconnected. This paper argues that the Southern Song was a crucial period that witnessed a closer interlinkage between the consolidation of written medical knowledge and the changing social implications of and criteria for accepted scholarship. |