American students typically learn extensively about the Black Death and its response in Europe. Were there any major pandemics in Ming or Qing China? How did the Imperial Dynasty respond?

by Redsoxjake14
amp1212

There is yet not a good English language work on plague in China before the 19th century.

Carol Benedict. Bubonic Plague in 19th Century China, Stanford University Press:1996 is a fine work, we'd love to see something like it for earlier periods, which are as yet still murky. While one can find accounts which claim evidence for, say, the Black Death in China, the evidence is equivocal.

Today, over thirty years after McNeill's Plagues and Peoples , we still cannot state with any degree of assurance whether the Black Death, which marked such a caesura in European history, even visited China or the Indian subcontinent in the fourteenth century, much less what impact it might have had in either of these civilizations. Ironically, much of our modern understanding of the plague derives from research conducted in China and India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries during the third pandemic, which first appeared in China and then spread to India, where it took the largest number of victims. The prominence of China and India in the third pandemic has certainly contributed to the conviction that these regions must also have played a prominent role in the beginning of the second pandemic, the Black Death [Sussman 2011]

There's substantial discussion of disease in Chinese history, Alfredo Morabia found some 488 recorded "epidemics" between 243 BCE and 1911 CE in Chinese records. William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples remains an important speculation regarding the probable history of epidemics in China, but its more inference than evidence. It's a measure of the challenges of this domain that this much older work hasn't been superceded.

One can point to a few scholars who have gone into depth with some of the materials -- Asaf Goldschmidt, for example, has identified specific bureaucratic responses at the time of the Northern Song ( 960-1127 CE) -- these consist of the establishment of new government entities and the promulgation of medical texts. It is hard to draw conclusions from these texts, such as that on "Cold Damage Disorders":

In mature yang Wind Attack Disorder, when the yang pulse [i.e., the pulse taken with light finger pressure] is floating and the yin pulse [under heavy pressure] is weak, the sensitivity to cold and wind extends to the slightest expo- sure, the fever is intense, and there are wheezing in the nasal passages and dry heaves; it is to be controlled by Cassia Twig Infusion.

. . . though Goldschmidt sketches a plausible interpretation of the impact on governance.

So file this under "more work needs to be done"

See:

SUSSMAN, GEORGE D. “Was the Black Death in India and China?” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 85, no. 3, 2011, pp. 319–355.

Morabia, A. “Epidemic and Population Patterns in the Chinese Empire (243 B.C.E. to 1911 C.E.): Quantitative Analysis of a Unique but Neglected Epidemic Catalogue.” Epidemiology and Infection, vol. 137, no. 10, 2009, pp. 1361–1368.

Goldschmidt, Asaf. “Epidemics and Medicine during the Northern Song Dynasty: The Revival of Cold Damage Disorders (Shanghan).” T'oung Pao, vol. 93, no. 1/3, 2007, pp. 53–109.

Hinrichs, TJ. “Picturing Medicine in Daily Life: Court and Commoner Perspectives in Song Era Paintings.” Imagining Chinese Medicine, edited by Vivienne Lo et al., vol. 18, Brill, LEIDEN; BOSTON, 2018, pp. 233–248.

Hinrichs, TJ and L. Barnes (eds) 2013, Chinese Medicine and Healing: An Illustrated History, Harvard University Press.