Vietnam in the pre-modern period

This chapter provides an overview of Chinese (or ‘Northern’) medicine as practised in pre-modern Vietnam. The focus is on the periods during the second millennium when Vietnam was independent from China but not yet colonised by the French. The chapter starts by situating Chinese medicine within the larger context of Vietnamese therapeutic practices. It further points out how climatic differences shaped ideas on southern diseases and medical treatments in both China and Vietnam. In this chapter, readers can also find information about primary source material, modern secondary scholarship in Western and East Asian languages, and the most influential Chinese texts in Vietnam during the latter half of the second millennium. After a short discussion of the two most famous Vietnamese doctors, Tuệ Tĩnh and Lê Hữu Trác, and a number of other doctors mainly associated with the Confucian tradition, the chapter concludes by emphasising how close-reading of primary texts preserved in Vietnam contributes to deconstructing the grand narrative approaches that still dominate the field.