Taking intellectual and social developments prior to China’s Republican period into account, we become aware of late-imperial roots of East Asian discourse on institutionalized health care. Contrary to what Chinese medical history publications generally claim today, reformers at the turn of the century envisioned medicines in China as universal, rather than particularly Chinese: The scholarly debate on China’s position in world history led to the revolutionary claim for public health care. While Japan had set a model by eradicating traditional medicine and replacing it by public hygiene, the method for China included also selected contents from ancient scripts on medicinal products.

This paper collects casual remarks and revolutionary arguments by scholars who – even though they did not work as physicians themselves – were concerned about the status relations in medicine. They saw health care as a societal phenomenon crucial to any beneficial outcomes of a cultural and social turmoil in China. The aim is to make their voices heard which belong neither to insider discourse among practitioners nor can they be just subsumed to the later revolutions of the Republican period.

Confronted with diverse medicines in China, these late Qing reformers worried about how to codify both practitioners and the written canon, yet to be distilled from re-ordered and re-read ancient scripts. They hoped by distinguishing scholarly, charlatan, or experienced prescribers of medicines and ancient scripts to supply hints about medicinal substances, which could still be identified in the flora, fauna and minerals of the vast land. With a new systematized order of society and worldview, the application of medicines was expected to benefit not only single human bodies but in fact the body politic in a global transition. Ideas about this ordering varied widely.

Thus, a new type of experts was expected to help human beings, throughout the country just as anywhere in the world. Contrary to later historiography in China, Chinese medicine was imagined as hopefully turning into a world medicine, with China’s innovative scholarship and revolutionized organizational structures as its centre. Earlier scholars and physicians were regarded as having overlooked potential medicinal substances in their sources, and the current strategies of prescribers as lacking philological training. “Revolution”, then, meant consulting the same sources in advanced ways.