The Construction of the Medical Writer’s Authority and Legitimacy in Late Imperial China through Authorial and Allographic Prefaces

International audienceAbstract: Over the Ming and Qing dynasties, the number of people involved in medical assistance increased dramatically. The number of medical treatises expanded in parallel with this increase in the number of medical experts. In these times of proliferation of medical texts and acute competition, when in addition the lack ofan institutional system of licensing allowed a great variety of people to practice medicine and to write and distribute medical texts, the authors had to develop a relevant strategy for valorizing and legitimizing their books. Part of this strategy is in the prefatory discourse. What an author says about himself and his text, who he calls on to write a preface and what these people consider as important to say in order to recommend a new book, are the points this article focuses on. They give some clues to understanding what medical authority and legitimacy relied on in late imperial China, when no central institution regulated the field and where, furthermore, since the nineteenth century, Europeans had started to spreaddifferent techniques and knowledge thereby increasing the already fierce competition