Tang Zonghai (1851-97) is well known as one of the earliest modern proponents of the integration of Chinese and Western medicine. In Views of the Body and Intellectual Transformation in Modern Chinese Medicine: Tang Zonghai and the Era of Chinese-Western Medical Convergence, Pi Kuo-Li presents a highly textured analysis of Tang's attempts to join Western anatomy with concepts of the body drawn from the medical classics as well as the broader historical context that made this intellectual project such a pressing endeavor. The period in which Tang lived saw the beginning of an increasingly critical appraisal of the forms of bodily knowledge underlying the authority of physicians of classical medicine. This reassessment of medical knowledge of the body stemmed from several sources, foremost among them the challenges of the physician Wang Qingren (1768-1831), who criticized received understandings of the body from within classical medicine, and the arguments of Western missionaries like Benjamin Hobson (1816-73), who legitimated their own medical leaming (and missionary enterprise) by criticizing Chinese physicians' lack of dissection-based anatomical knowledge. Enter Tang Zonghai, a physician and literatus who engaged with the critiques of Wang Qingren and proponents of Western anatomy while defending the authority of "gi transformation" (gihua) and its associated notions about the workings of bodies and their relationship to the cosmos as the most authoritative foundations for medical knowledge. Pi explores Tang's defense of the medical classics through a detailed study of the bodily knowledge at the heart of his medical thought. In the process, Pi presents a well...
