The Formation of “Recipes for Ailments” in the Qin and Western Han

The publication of newly unearthed texts, such as the bamboo slips of Peking University Bing Fang (病方, Recipes for Ailments), has made the evolution of “recipes for ailments” or bing fang clearer. First, in the Qin Dynasty, “recipes for ailments” often had no catalogs, and their contents were relatively heterogeneous. In the Western Han Dynasty, recipes for ailments were commonly categorized by the name of the disease in the table of contents, and the format of the main text was in line with the table of contents. At the same time, the recipes for livestock, which were common in the Qin, disappeared in the early years of the Western Han, and zhuyou (祝由, incantations for expulsion) recipes were gradually marginalized after the middle of the Western Han Dynasty. Subsequently, in the Western Han Dynasty, the meaning of “zhuyou recipes” was narrowed to the way of dealing with human diseases in contrast to medical treatments, with the boundary between “recipes for ailments” and other occult texts becoming clearer. In conclusion, recipes for ailments as a classification of book gradually formed from content to structure from the Qin to late Western Han.