有蟲還是無蟲？———中國上古醫療史中的“蠱”

Visible or Invisible? Gu in Early Chinese Medical History

Abstract

LANGUAGE NOTE | Document text in Chinese; abstract also in English.

中國醫療史的研究在過去百年得到長足的發展，然而，“蠱”作爲一個與疾病有關的名詞，雖然在古代醫學或非醫學的文獻中屢見不鮮，但前人多把視野聚焦在畜蠱害人之上，忽略了“蠱”在醫學疾病中的意義。本文以甲骨文、清華簡及其他先秦文獻入手，探索“蠱”在先秦時期的含意，並討論古人防“蠱”與治“蠱”之法，亦會窺探上古醫療疾病觀。

Scholarship on Chinese medical history has made considerable progress since last century. However, despite its frequent occurrences in ancient medical and non-medical documents, the word gu, a term associated with diseases, has only been studied in light of the practice of “collecting gu to harm others” in previous scholarship, no attention has been paid to its meaning in the medical study of diseases. Making use of inscriptions on oracle bones, bamboo slips preserved at Tsinghua University, and other pre-Qin documents, this essay aims to (1) explore the meaning of gu in pre-Qin contexts, (2) discuss how ancient people prevented and treated gu, and (3) observe the concepts of illnesses and medical treatments in ancient times.