ABSTRACT
The range of the project has grown as the people embraced all the topics which increasingly became essential to do justice to the rubric ‘Chinese Medicine’. Contributors to the Routledge Handbook Series aim to provide cutting-edge overviews of current scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences with an authoritative guide to theory and method, the key sub-disciplines and current major debates. Historians have come a long way from representing the classics of Chinese medicine as a revealed truth of pre-history, delivered by the Yellow Emperor in conversation with his ministers and advisers. Certain types of medical knowledge were derived, from the Han period onwards, by observing the tissues, bones and viscera of the physical body. Modern science has very few strategies for testing multi-ingredient remedies and traditional herbal remedies, such as goji, ginseng and gingko, as well as those like Padma, are marketed because of their profile as TCM preparations.
