Traditional Chinese medicine has two linked parts. One is the medical art: it takes a person as a whole, corresponding to heaven, earth and the seasons, tells conditions apart by yin and yang, and decides on treatment according to the case. The other is the knowledge of medicines: what has been learned and written down about medicines of many kinds.
Mawangdui Tomb 3 in Changsha was sealed in 168 BCE, and the silk manuscripts of remedies and channel texts found in it are the earliest physical evidence of Chinese medical theory taking shape. The Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon was also compiled between the Warring States and the Western Han.
At the end of the Eastern Han Zhang Zhongjing wrote the Treatise on Cold Damage and Miscellaneous Diseases, which established the clinical way of treating by pattern differentiation: begin by telling which pattern the illness belongs to, then choose medicines and treatment accordingly.
In the Ming, Li Shizhen completed the Compendium of Materia Medica, bringing together the materia medica learning of all earlier ages. This class is about the medical tradition itself.
Traditional Medicine is the class in the chapter on Sciences on Chinese medicine and the learning of medicines: the medical tradition, from the Han on, that looks at a person as a whole and treats by pattern differentiation, together with the learning about medicines built up alongside it, from the remedies and channel texts found in a Han tomb at Mawangdui, through Zhang Zhongjing's Treatise on Cold Damage and Miscellaneous Diseases in the Eastern Han, to Li Shizhen's Compendium of Materia Medica in the Ming.
