美國出版英文專書的經驗分享（二）：從簽約到線上開放（Open Access）

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Hands-on experience has for centuries remained an essential source of medical knowledge. Literary strategies for warranting claims to experiential knowledge in medical literature changed dramatically, however, in mid-imperial China (800–1279). In this first book-length study of the use of empirical evidence in Chinese medicine during this period, Ruth Yun-Ju Chen explores how a centuries-old strategy for narrating authors’ personal experience and for substantiating medical claims was elaborated in the ninth century and matured and gained salience in the eleventh century.

Focusing on medical genres and working extensively with notebooks (biji), Chen shows that this empirical strategy became prominent in conjunction not only with broad changes in the literati’s epistemic cultures in mid-imperial China but also with a publishing boom during the Song dynasty (960–1279) involving texts that imparted medical knowledge, such as collections of remedies, pharmacological manuals, travel literature, and notebooks. The boom owed largely to unprecedented government sponsorship of medical publishing and the spread of print technology in the Song. The publishing boom meant greater availability of and accessibility to those texts, therefore expanding the types and numbers of medical readers, including self-taught and “amateur” readers. The wider availability of these texts meanwhile fostered intertextual debates between Song authors and their contemporaries. To win these intertextual debates and to convince the widest possible audience of medical readers that their accounts were reliable, many Song authors of medical literature turned to the abovementioned empirical strategy. Revealing significant correlations across epistemic cultures, the publishing boom, and changes in preferred persuasion strategies in medical genres, Chen’s study offers new insights into the histories of knowledge, publishing, and medicine in mid-imperial China.

Why and how did the strategy of documenting medical practices through personal experience rise to prominence in China? This question is at the heart of Good Formulas, the first book-length study of the use of empirical evidence in Chinese medicine between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. The rise of this new approach to substantiating knowledge, which had appeared only sporadically in earlier medical literature, provides a window into transformations in the construction of textual authority in mid-imperial China. Focusing on medical genres and working extensively with notebooks (biji), Ruth Yun-Ju Chen shows that employing empirical evidence became prominent in conjunction with a

publishing boom that enabled wider availability of medical texts and treatises. To convince a more socioculturally diverse readership to believe their claims and to win intertextual debates with contemporaneous authors, many Song medical authors turned to empirical methodology. Revealing a correlation between publishing cultures and changes in persuasion strategies in medical genres, Good Formulas offers new insights into the histories of medicine, knowledge production, and publishing in China. It also provides rich examples for scholars interested in the development of empirical evidence in the premodern world.