« Learning and Teaching Medicine in Late Imperial China »
Résumé
Describing the processes and pedagogical activities that took place within the framework of medical apprenticeship in late imperial China raises a number of issues that have already been addressed in this volume. Firstly, we know very little on the practical processes of teaching in premodern traditions and even less on how pupils or beginners actually
learned. While teaching schedules were at times defined by masters, we have very little evidence of how teachers and beginners put them into practice. Secondly, when sources related to a teaching/learning situation do exist, a second problem is one that derives from attempting to understand these sources and the activities they support from the point
of view of our modern experience of learning and teaching. Against this latter problem, the posture Pierre Hadot adopted in his analysis of the philosophical texts of Antiquity, illustrated by his well-known injunction “toute oeuvre doit être placée dans la praxisdont elle émane” (every work must be replaced in the praxis from which it emanates) appears attractive
when analyzing the sources that were written in relation to medical
apprenticeship in pre-modern China. This is why while focusing on one
particular text, devoted to teaching medicine at the beginning of the
nineteenth century in China, I have found it important to reconstruct the
social, material, cultural environment in which this text is thought to have
been written and to replace the modalities of teaching and learning lying
in this particular text into the wider landscape of medical instruction in
late imperial China. As it will appear in the discussion, this landscape was
complex even though an imperial institution existed that was intended
to set the rule.