Makers › Physician / Medical Master
Tan Yunxian
Ming woman physician of Wuxi who learned medicine from her grandmother, treated mainly women, and recorded thirty-one cases in her Miscellaneous Words of a Female Doctor
In a dispensary, a tall wooden cabinet of many small drawers stands behind a stone mortar and pestle, with herbs hanging from the beams; a copper scale, a clay pot on a small lit stove and baskets of leaves sit in front, and one person with a basket walks in the herb garden.
Also known as Wuxi Tanshi
Tan Yunxian came from a family of physicians in Wuxi under the Ming; her grandfather Tan Fu was a doctor, and her father Tan Gang, a metropolitan graduate, served in the Ministry of Justice at Nanjing. Her grandmother of the Ru family taught the bright girl to read medical books and before she died passed on the formulas and principles she had gathered over a lifetime. After marrying into the Yang family, Tan treated herself and her children, then began seeing patients, most of them women, since women of the time could not easily be examined in person by male physicians. In 1510, at the age of fifty, she gathered thirty-one of her cases into Miscellaneous Words of a Female Doctor (Nuyi zayan), later printed by her son Yang Lian. She lived to ninety-six, and her book is one of the few surviving works by a Ming woman physician.
Life and times
Dates 1461 CE–1556 CE (death by another account 1557)