Illness, Remedies and Medical Care in Han China

People in Han China sought help through remedies, hands-on treatment, guided exercise and rites directed at spirits. Medical manuscripts buried at Mawangdui in the second century BCE preserve recipes and ideas about the body. The physician Chunyu Yi’s case histories add a different view: accounts of named patients, examinations and reported outcomes during the Western Han.

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Mawangdui and the medical manuscripts

Mawangdui contained three Western Han tombs associated with Li Cang, a senior official in the Changsha kingdom, his wife Xin Zhui, and a younger man generally identified as a relative. Excavated between 1972 and 1974, the tombs held fine textiles, lacquered vessels, food remains and manuscripts. The third tomb was sealed in 168 BCE. Its manuscripts, written on silk and bamboo, preserve medical works alongside texts on other subjects.

One manuscript is now known as Wushi’er Bingfang, or Recipes for Fifty-Two Ailments. The title was chosen by modern editors because the text begins with a list of 52 conditions. The work preserves traditions older than the burial, including material associated with the preceding Qin period. It contains more than 250 prescriptions and treatments. Other Mawangdui medical texts record matters such as bodily channels, pulse diagnosis and treatment with moxa, a plant material burned on or near the body. These are separate works, not parts of a single handbook.

Recognising illness and choosing a treatment

Early medical texts organised knowledge around named ailments, observed signs and proposed remedies. Some Mawangdui works describe eleven bodily channels, routes through which vital processes were believed to move. Practitioners examined the body and felt its vessels or pulse, interpreting qualities they detected through touch in relation to a patient’s condition.

Recipes for Fifty-Two Ailments groups treatments by condition, while other works develop bodily channels and diagnostic ideas in more detail. The tradition represented by the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon connects bodily processes with yin and yang, complementary forces, and the Five Phases of wood, fire, earth, metal and water. These were ways to relate symptoms and organs within an ordered account of the body.

Medicines, procedures and ritual remedies

Recipes for Fifty-Two Ailments addresses conditions including warts, hemorrhoids, groin swellings and snakebites. Its prescriptions draw on substances from plants, animals and minerals. Treatments could involve taking a preparation internally, washing, applying substances to the body, or using smoke. The text also describes lancing and cauterization. These procedures required someone to manipulate the affected part of the body, adding skilled actions to the preparation of medicines.

Preparing a remedy could require grinding ingredients, combining them with liquid or heating them. A decoction extracted substances by boiling them; powders and pills provided other forms for internal treatment. External preparations could be applied to the skin, while fumes supplied another route of treatment. Recipes could also prescribe spoken formulas or ritual actions alongside material ingredients.

Guided movement and bodily care

A painted silk chart from the third Mawangdui tomb depicts 44 figures in sitting and standing postures. Known as the Daoyin Tu, or Guided Stretching Chart, it associates exercises with written labels, including names of movements, ailments, animals and equipment. The images show varied positions and actions; related descriptions include stretching, bending, breathing exercises and movements that imitate animals.

Daoyin , often translated as guiding and stretching, joined controlled movement with attention to the body. The chart and related writing suggest that such exercises could be directed at particular complaints as well as bodily maintenance.

Patients and practitioners in the case histories

Chunyu Yi practised in the kingdom of Qi, in present-day Shandong, during the second century BCE. Sima Qian’s Records of the Historian preserves twenty-five case histories associated with him. They identify men and women of different standings, including nobles, commoners and servants, and describe complaints, examination, diagnosis and a proposed course of treatment. The accounts include deaths as well as recoveries.

Chunyu Yi had learned from other practitioners, linking access to specialist knowledge with teaching and personal contacts. In one recorded case, he examined the pulse of a military commander named Poshi and predicted a fatal illness; the narrative reports the man’s death soon afterwards. Such accounts presented diagnosis as a skilled judgment about the course of illness, including when treatment would fail.

For the wider setting, see Daily Life in Han China: Households, Work, and Social Obligations.