Shen Gua’s Empiricism

the few concepts and practices that are propagated as “traditional Chinese medicine” today. In a final chapter, Liu Yan finds some clear words to explain the historically unjustified “emphasis on the benign naturalness of Chinese drug therapy” as a “strategic rhetoric that highlighted the unique benefits of Chinese medicine [...] at the expense of admitting the heterogeneity, diversity and complex internal dynamics of multiple traditions of Chinese medical practice developed across vast expanses of time and place. This romanticized impression has carried on to our own time” (p. 172). It is hoped that the example set by Liu Yanwith his bookwill be followed bymany in the future. Some Europeanmedical historiansmay object to a persistent, nonchalant use of the terms “pharmacological” and “pharmacopoeia,” irrespective of the fact that not all materia medica literature is “pharmacological” (a “pharmacology” as an explanatory theory how drugs act in the human body was not conceptualized in China prior to the Song-Jin-Yuan era) and that the first Chinese “pharmacopoeia,” that is a drug code with a legal status, appeared in China only in 1936. But this is common usage in English language publications now and does not diminish the value of Liu Yan’s book.