ABSTRACT
The divergence of Western and Eastern medicine on the basis of the former’s innovation in dissection and anatomy needs to be revised in the light of new histories of waike 外科 (External Medicine). External Medicine, a category established a thousand years ago, treats diseases mostly of the skin and flesh with a history of surgical procedures, particularly to eliminate nong 膿 (pus), that is, the suppurating pathological transformations of body fluids which cause flesh to fester. Operations on what we would now consider infected flesh persisted right into the twentieth century before there were either antibiotics or effective anaesthesia and were inevitably dangerous surgical procedures everywhere in the world before then. This chapter summarises the history of External Medicine procedures, and traces the dynamic with Internal Medicine whose practitioners also treated the same symptoms with prescriptions.
