ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the range of Chinese diagnostic skills and their grounding in the doctor’s sensory skills. Beginning with the four essential diagnostic techniques recorded in the Huangdi bashiyi nanjing 黃帝八十一難經 (The Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Eighty-One Difficult Issues, c. second century CE), it surveys the changing priorities in diagnosis over two millennia. The rise of tongue diagnosis was a very late addition to Chinese diagnostic techniques and its concentration on visual evidence was perhaps a response to China’s encounters with new cultures of objectivity brought by Europeans to China in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
