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Volker Scheid. Currents of Tradition in Chinese Medicine, 1626-2006. Seattle: Eastland Press, 2007. xxii + 564 pp. Ill. $39.95 (paperbound, 978-0-939616-56-5).
What is "traditional" about "traditional Chinese medicine" (TCM)? How can one reconcile the diachronic and synchronic heterogeneity of Chinese medical beliefs and practices with the idea that they constitute a coherent system? Few provide more thoughtful answers than the TCM practitioner and anthropologist Volker Scheid. In his earlier Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis (Duke University Press, 2002), Scheid showed how shifting alignments in the sociomedical infrastructures of TCM foster medical plurality. Currents of Tradition takes a complementary approach, analyzing how medical traditions maintain their identity even as their form and content are altered across place and time. His focus is the historically important "current of learning" (pai) associated with the southeastern town of Menghe. Eschewing static translations of pai as "sect" or "school," Scheid argues that medical "currents" are ongoing, dynamic processes of knowledge and identity creation, arising from networks of individuals who carry out the "labor of social memory" to impart meaning to past events.
As adroitly dissected by Scheid, the rise, flourishing, and decline of the Menghe current is a multilayered phenomenon. At the most basic level, it is the story of how Menghe became a prominent medical center after the seventeenth century and...