In modern Western societies people tend to demarcate disciplines of healing as they divide the self: biomedicine for the body, psychology for the mind, and religion for the spirit. If the popularity of holistic alternative healing systems suggests that these categories do not sit entirely well even with modern Westerners, they are even more inadequate to China. Historically and still today in China, the management of sickness and health is rooted in different views of self, different social and institutional configurations, and different healing traditions.

Patients: Disordered Selves

Chinese sources do make distinctions not dissimilar to those of body, mind, and spirit: they speak of the body as physical form. They speak of the person's spirit, of multiple bodily spirits, and of yin and yang souls. People are known to think and to have emotions, and medical sources speak of...