ABSTRACT
The Unschuld Collection of medical handwritten texts constitutes a window to popular healing practices of the late Qing and Republican periods. While many manuscripts in the collection at least partly represent orthodox, theory-based, practices of literati medicine, others show the preference of the authors for practical, cheap, manual, or heterodox therapies. Lay people, folk healers, or physicians with a relatively low level of formal education, itinerant drug-peddlers, experts in trauma medicine, and ritual healers recorded what they considered useful for curing diseases or at least for selling their services. This chapter gives an overview of such practices: simple, local pharmacotherapy, acupuncture, bloodletting and cauterisation, bone setting and massage, obstetric treatments and abortion, folk dietetics, and magico-religious practices. The coalescence of ideas and tools within these therapies, some elaborate and specialised, some ordinary, and some even harmful, represents the heterogenous and fluid nature of popular healing at the time.
