Abstract

This chapter represents an initial step in a larger project investigating the narratives of Chinese medicine. I argue that we should pay attention to the study of “narratology” and the “narrative acts” in Chinese medicine as well as its epistemology. By foregrounding the issue of “narratives,” I suggest that not only is it important to grasp the construction of Chinese medical knowledge, it is crucial to investigate how such knowledge is framed by or presented via certain “stories” or “plots.” To label these narratives “stories” or “plots” is not to imply that they are somehow “fictional” or “untruthful,” nor is it to suggest that such narrative-making is unique to so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM). Rather, these stories give coherence to a body of knowledge like Chinese medicine; they make it portable, transmissible, comprehensible, identifiable, and attractive to its audiences.