Medical Exchanges Between the Han and the Viet c. 300 BCE-1389 CE

C. Michele Thompson
Southern Connecticut State University

This essay will present an over view of medically related exchanges between the Han Chinese and the Yüeh/Viet from the time of the creation of the medical manuscripts found at Ma Wang Tui to end of the life of one of Vietnam's most famous healers-Tue Tinh. The essay will examine the formal exchange of medical texts, Materia Medica, and medical practitioners through the tributary relationship between China and Vietnam starting with the Warring States Period. It will go on to cover what is known about medically related interactions between the ethnic Viet and their Chinese overlords during the period of direct Chinese rule over the territory which is now northern Vietnam, 43 CE to 939 CE. The paper will then move to a discussion of the role of Buddhist monks in charity medical work during the early dynastic period. The essay will conclude with the poignant example of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Tue Tinh . At the time Tue Tinh (1330 to c. 1389) lived Vietnam was required to send tribute to China and when he was fifty-five years old Tue Tinh was arrested and sent to China with the tribute mission of 1385 as a gift to the Ming royal family. Tue Tinh had a very successful career in China and his second major medical treatises, the Nam Duoc Than Hieu (Miraculous Drugs of the South), was written while he lived at the Ming court. This work was designed to systematize the use of Vietnamese medicaments within the parameters of Chinese drug theory and to present and explain Vietnamese medicine to Chinese physicians at the Ming court. His career is thus a summation of the medical relationship between the Han and the Viet.

C. Michele Thompson received a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History from the University of Washington. She is currently an Associate Professor of History at Southern Connecticut State University. She is the author of several articles on Vietnamese Traditional Medicine and on French Colonial Science and Medicine in Indochina including: "Scripts and Medical Scripture in Vietnam: Nôm and Classical Chinese in the Historic Transmission of Medical Knowledge in Pre-Twentieth Century Vietnam." Thoi Daii Moi no. 5 (July 2005) http://www.thoidai.org; "French Colonial Medicine and Pharmacology in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, 1802-1954" in Benedikt Stuchtey ed., Science Across the European Empires, 1800-1950. Studies of the German Historical Institute London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; "Medicine, Nationalism, and Revolution in Vietnam: the Roots of a Medical Collaboration to 1945." In EASTM: East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (21) Summer, 2004; "Mission to Macau: Smallpox, Vaccinia, and the Nguy?n Dynasty." in Portuguese Studies Review 9:1&2 Special Issue The Evolution of Portuguese Asia, 1498-1998 2001; Scripts, Signs, and Swords : the Viet Peoples and the Origins of Nôm Sino-Platonic Papers no.104. University of Pennsylvania, Dept. of Oriental Studies, March 2000. She is currently working on a manuscript to be published as Northern Treasures Southern Essences: an Examination of Vietnamese Traditional Medicine and she is the Chair of the Vietnam Studies Group.

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