Generation Medical Family And Private Health Care:Case Study Of Family He In River South

In the vast information of medical history, the doctor is a very meaningful object of study. This paper selects Family He of River South that has passed through800years in Chinese medical history as a case, to examine generation medical family's heritage and reproduction in traditional society, to explore its unique family form, to restore partially its life history, and hence, on this basis, analyzes the operation mode of private medical care in traditional society. Based on this, this paper tries a cross-over study of a family history and medical social history, which unfolds two dimensions of the medical destiny of Family He of River South, and the operation mode and characteristics of private medical field in traditional society.First, generation medical family practices medicine successively, and their occupational characteristics greatly influence the shape of their family. Through combing the reproduction history of Family He of River South, clarifying the descent and main branches, and then partially restoring the life history of this family and medical practice, we can see the generation medical family is more migratory and enjoys more outward tension of development than ordinary agricultural family, which is the necessary means to avoid internal competition among the common ancestry doctors in the same geographic area. At the same time, under the influence of traditional social mainstream consciousness, the first choice of development goals for generation medical family was no different from other family, which was getting official position by Imperial Examination, rather than practicing medicine. Especially after the mid Ming dynasty, since members of generation medical family were blocked from entering government health care system, they turned from the medical to Confucianism obviously. But being subject to the brutal and intense competition of Imperial Examination, they took the development strategy of combining medicine and Confucian as a compromise. Many family members became the Confucian doctors who were active in the local community, established a wide range of social circle of Confucian medical, or even evolved toward cultural family. It was objectively counterproductive to their values and mode of practicing medicine.Second, in Chinese ancient history, since the official medical institutions led by Imperial Hospital had no desire and nor ability to meet the medical needs of the people, the middle and lower officials and the vast majority of ordinary people mainly got medical services from private doctors who practiced freely. Because private medical care were basically not subject to the jurisdiction of government, and lack of systems and regulations, doctors and patients interacted with the game in an open medical space, which made private medical field full of energy, resilience, flexibility and self-regulating capacity, but also full of chaos. It is no doubt that the factors of social status, network of relationships, culture class had played a very important role in the game and competition in the medical field, and affected the allocation and flows of medical resources. It is worth noting that the competition between doctors at different levels is never on pure knowledge and skills instead of the inferiority or superiority battle of the cultural ethics. In a sense, all the efforts and ultimate fate of generation medical family depended on it.Based on the two dimensions above, this paper takes generation medical family and private medical care as the object of study and the core issue, explores the generation medical family's development strategy, survival wisdom, moral values and survival predicament in the domain of private medical field.In the late Ming Dynasty, generation medical family gradually withdrew from the official medical system, and returned to the local community. Some long-standing generation medical family entered the private medical field in the image and strategy of sense of culture. On the one hand, generation doctors actively participated in local affairs through retrospective and construction of clan origin, and cultural exchanges with the literati class, so as to achieve "seeking connections with Confucianism", and to reach the medical orthodox status, which in reality there was a hope to get rid of the stigma of the medical identity, to be connected with and even attributed to Confucian groups, hence formed their own unique social resources and cultural power at the local community. On the other hand, the generation medical family fostered deeply by popular Confucianism, as one of the most important doctor groups in the traditional society, profoundly shaped the operational rules and the moral force of the private medical field, and to a certain extent regulated the laissez-faire market competition. However, in the context of absent industry community and government control, these elite doctors still make efforts in vain to change the whole status of chaos and autonomy of the private medical care. Therefore, the market combined with high ethics and technique only exists in ideal.