In TCM, the term “infectious disease” is not a conventional term. Thus, it cannot be used to confirm that such concept exists in traditional Chinese medicine. However, a search in all databases suggested that there is only one above example linking ‘Wen Yi’ to infectious disease. The Zhu Bing Jie Fa ( Diagnosis and Treatment of Various Diseases), which was published in the Ming dynasty, uses the word “infectious disease” specifically for leprosy. Literature review found that such understanding of infection also exist in TCM literature. Coined by the experimental scientists in the late 19th century, the term is invented to describe a new set of diseases based on the germ theory. The so-called “infectious diseases” is a term used to describe transmissible diseases caused by invasion of microorganism. The term “Yi Bing” also has the same meaning. it is a general term for acute epidemic infectious diseases ( ). However, the explanation of Wen Yi in modern Chinese is very simple, i.e. The so-called Wen Bing and Yi Li in medical books are often the general terms of epidemic diseases. Lin Fu Shi ( ), a Taiwanese scholar, believes that the understanding of plague in the Middle Ages is still very vague. ![]() If they could not be distinguished, then how the public could differentiate”? “When the ancient and modern disease names are different, search result is often hindered and suspicious irrespective of whether you are performing a slow or an urgent search. Doctors in the Song Dynasty had noticed that the phenomenon of the same disease but different Chinese names might cause confusion. For instance, “Shang Han is a noble term, while TangXi and Wen Yi are folks’ terms, with different names but the same disease”. It is just the difference of common name and scholarly term only. Chen Yanzhi ( ), a famous doctor in the Eastern Jin Dynasty, contended that there is no difference in the meaning of the various names given to the disease. Zhou Hou Fang ( Handbook of Prescriptions) states that “Shang Han, seasonal epidemic and warm epidemic are from the same source which have little difference ( )”. “Li Ji ( plague)”, “Li Qi ( pestilent qi)”, “Zhang Li ( miasma disease)”, “Wen Bing ( / warm/plague disease)”, “Wen Yi ( epidemic)”, “Han Yi ( cold epidemic)”, “Shi Yi ( seasonal epidemic)”, and “Tian Xing ( climatic epidemic)”. There are many expressions of epidemic in the Chinese traditional literature and artefacts, including “Yi ( epidemic)”, “Li ( plague)”. Due to the coronavirus outbreak, epidemic history-related articles are spiking again. In the past 20 years, the disease history and medical history research results is fruitful and has become a long-lasting subject which cannot be underestimated by the academic circles. The medical social history, disaster history, environmental history, and population history of China have also been rewritten in the name of “plague”. Research on malignant infectious diseases such as plague, cholera, leprosy, and schistosomiasis has been carried out. ![]() The outbreak of SARS in 2003 triggered the concern of Chinese scholars about the history of disease and public health. Among them, research of a Japanese scholar, Lijima ( ), which is based on the concept of infectious disease, has great influence on the domestic historiography circle. ![]() Influenced by Western historians in the 1980s, Japanese and Taiwanese scholars began to pay close attention to historical epidemics in the study of Chinese history. The investigation of epidemic diseases in the history of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) used to focus on the literature, academics, and schools, while the theory of Wen Bing ( plague), which is directly related to epidemic diseases, mainly been investigated for the thoughts of doctors and its scholarly history. The study of epidemics was originally the patent of epidemiology, public health, anthropology, and archaeology.
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