Dietary Hygiene and Allied Literature in the Ming Dynasty of China

ZHENG JINSHENG

The China Institute for the History of Medicine and Medical Literature Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Beijing, China In the area of dietary hygiene, what is food and what is medicine? this seems a simple enough question. But it is not easy to make a clear distinction between what was considered food and what material medical in ancient China. As the ancient Chinese proverb goes, "Both food and drugs come from the same source."

Shennong, the Divine Peasant, is believed to be an originator of traditional Chinese pharmaceutics. He is said to have tried the taster of hundreds of kinds of herbs and examined springs to find out whether they were sweet or bitter. Thus he taught the people what harmful plants they ought to avoid and where they could find help.1) His work, then, was not only in trying to search out drugs, but also to

find out about the quality of food and drink.

Still, there is one ancient argument about distinguishing between food and drugs which may helpful: "That which is used to allay one's hunger is called food, and that which is used to treat disease is called a drug."2) In this light, it is interesting to see that almost all edibles and drinkable were recorded in the Chinese herbal books, and a special type of Chinese material medical system was thus constituted.

Hygiene: Hygiene means weisheng in Chinese, Literally, the full connotation of weisheng can be summarized in the following two concepts: on the one hand, quli,trying to follow those ways which are beneficial to one's health; and on the other hand, bihai,i.e. avoiding harms or detriments to the body. That is to say, try to adopt various kinds of means to promote health, such as taking certain kinds of food or drugs, and practising qigong or daoyin exercises, or other physical exercises. Then, avoid harms or detriments, by which we mean to stay away from causes of ill health, which may include certain types of food, drink, environment, psychology, labour, sport, and so on.

The two aspects of Chinese dietary hygiene, as mentioned above, are interrelated: in other words, one must follow ways that are benefit-same as modern nutritional science, because the dietary hygiene of Traditional Chinese Medicine pays attention not only to diet, but also to things it considers related to food and drink. What is more, one must note the highly important fact that the principle of dietary

hygiene is based on the fundamental theories of Chinese medicine.

As for the literature of dietary hygiene, we can find a great deal of material concerning dietetics not only in medical literature, but also in other various literature of ancient China. Three categories of the available literature are most closely related to dietary hygiene, as follows:

a. Cookbooks: Cookbooks always deal with food, whose motive for writing the book is to tell people how to eat well. Cooking methods are the primary content of such books, and of course, con-tent dealing with medicine are occasionally included, though this is not the main gist of such works.

b. Bencao(herbal literature): The subject discussed in such books is drugs, and this includes foods which are believed to be of medical or hygienic value. The properties, tastes, flavours, functions, indications and other related contents are usually described in detail in such works.

c. Dietetic Bencao Works: Although the objects of discussion in such works are foods and drinks, their purposes are medicinal. In such works, all the other contents and the general style are the same as that of the regular Bencao except that the materials are strictly limited to food and drink. There are no absolute lines of demarcation between the three kinds of books mentioned above. Their connections can be shown in the folloing simple diagram:

This chapter will focus on the dietetic Bencao works, which are the most important among the literatures of dietetic hygiene. However other literature will be referred to as necessary, so as not to artificially limit the range of our discussion.