Healing, Entertaining, and Accumulating Merit: The Circulation of Medical Recipes from the Late Ming through the Qing

Abstract

This article examines the circulation of medical recipes through vernacular literature and personal networks from the late Ming through the Qing. During this period, vernacular texts played a leading role in circulating practical instructions for everyday healing techniques, especially in the form of recipes. Recipes became a versatile textual form for recording and transmitting experience in quotidian practice. They moved among different genres of texts, providing information about healing, offering advice for entertainment, and delivering moral lessons. Literati sociability as well as philanthropic and religious commitments motivated people of varied social means to distribute vernacular texts bearing healing information to a broad audience. Recipes acquired legitimacy and authority by clearly marking their provenance and thus its relationship to particular social networks and, sometimes, a religious purpose as well.

Keywords

medical recipes / vernacular texts / intertextuality / philanthropic activism / accumulation of merit / circulation of quotidian information

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2019 Higher Education Press and Brill