Tracking Shifting Body Knowledge in Ming Qing China

My research is largely concerned with the question of how knowledge relates to practice in Chinese History. I ask, with the focus on medicine, what writings and their paratexts tell us about this relationship, and how a sense of professionalization was developed despite the fact that no institutional organizations offered the means for distinction and identity. I am currently exploring a particular module within medical writings, namely the wide production of printed illustrations of the human body in Ming Qing, China. I am, by analysing minor and major differences among these descriptive illustrations, looking for the significance of these differences for medical practice in relation to transmitted knowledge patterns. Furthermore, I shall ask if and to what extent these differences should or can be seen in connection with greater shifts in knowledge domains at that time.