Beyond Indulgence: Diet-Induced Illnesses in Chinese Medicine

抄録

This paper explores how Chinese physicians before the modern period thought about the relationships between eating and illness. It identifies two broad periods in the development of these ideas. In the first, from the late Zhou through the early Tang dynasties, doctors wrote about the importance of balance and moderation to a healthy diet, and the sorts of eating-induced illnesses they discussed were generally associated with overindulgence. These emphases did not disappear in the late imperial period, but they took on a new urgency and they were joined by a new attention to illnesses associated with food deprivation and hunger. This change reflected both the way in which thirteenth-century physician Li Dongyuan raised the eating-illness connection to a new level of significance, and the way in which social and economic change in late imperial China had focused more attention on the habits of the rich and the plight of the poor.