In late imperial China, debates over how virtuosity in medical practice might be cultivated unfolded within a world that connected physicians to scholars, poets, calligraphers, Buddhist monks, Daoist life-cultivation experts and military strategists. This book traces these debates, showing how medicine was imagined as akin to poetry, how clinical insight was shaped through meditative bodily practices and how practitioners pursued empirical investigation. At the same time, medicine and the body became vital conceptual resources for intellectuals seeking to address broader social and philosophical questions

Volker Scheid is a Visiting Scholar at the China Centre, University of Kiel. He was previously Professor of East Asian Medicines and Director of EASTmedicine, a transdisciplinary research group for the study of East Asian medicines, at the University of Westminster, London. He has published two earlier monographs on the history of Chinese medicine in late imperial and contemporary China, a textbook of Chinese medicine formulas, and over thirty papers in peer-reviewed journals. Besides his academic career, he has been a practitioner of Chinese medicine since 1984.