ABSTRACT
Chinese pharmacology has a robust tradition of theoretical recipe formulation and drug combination dating back to the second century CE. However, it was only in the Song Dynasty that these theories came under intense scrutiny, discussion and adaptation, with the advent of a new state pharmacy, publication bureau and medical academy. With the alignment of scholarly, bureaucratic and medical institutions, and the advent of large-scale printing, the intellectual landscapes of medicine went through a dramatic shift. This shift took the form of more refined and intense theoretical debate about pathogenesis, treatment principles and recipe combinations, in the spirit of the Neo-Confucian intellectual movement to ‘investigate things’. These theoretical currents were to undergo numerous shifts over ensuing dynasties. From these early discourses emerged theoretical schools centred around the four ‘Jin-Yuan masters’. By the Ming Dynasty, we see the culmination of the materia medica literature in Li Shizhen’s magnum opus, Bencao gangmu 本草綱目 (Comprehensive Materia Medica), and in the Ming-Qing period the emergence of ‘Warm Disease’ theory to explain large-scale epidemics. This chapter provides a brief introduction to these major theoretical developments, and points the way to major primary sources and secondary sources on each.
