명청시대 의사와 지역사회 - 강남지역 유의(儒醫)를 중심으로

Abstract

Compared with Song(宋) and Yuan(元) dynasty, Ming and Qingdynasty relatively paid less attention to the health care policy. However it does not necessarily mean that medical facilities and manpower have weakened. The vacuum generated by the government’s passive health care policy was filled by private physicians. During Ming and Qing period, the regions south of the Yangtze River were not only the economic and cultural center, but also the medical center. In these regions, medical education and training were conducted by physicians themself other than public medical education institution. The ways can be classified into slef-study, and learning from the elder physicians, or getting education in family. But these ways were not isolated, usually they were used together. And, there existed a number of medical families (called “Shi Yi(世醫)”) which take medicine as a career from one generation to the next generation. The existence of Shi Yi made a contribution to satisfying the need of medical facility, and did a great favor to reproducing physicians. Wuzhong(吴中) and Xin’an(新安) were most developed medical centers in the regions south of the Yangtze River as well as all over the country. We can find that, the social, cultural and geographical factors of local area played an important role in the medical development, and deeply decided the feature of local medicine. On the other side, in Ming and Qing period, physician had become an opening occupation.Since Confucianism had been the dominant knowledge, a discourse which emphasized the affinity between Confucianism and medicine was produced. Physicians tended to manipulate the label of “Confucian physician(儒醫)” in order to improve their social position, even though it did not worked actually. However, “Confucian physician”, as a value and standard, did make a contribution to normalizing the health care industry more or less.