Medicine and Military in Traditional China: Space, Boundary, and Cognate Vocabulary

There is a long-standing interrelationship between the military and medical spheres in society. Military actions rely on medical services to tend to casualties, and medical advances often come from the pressure of military campaigns that generate large numbers of patients. That interrelationship is a linear one of simple paired interaction. However, there is a deeper and more subtle relationship that influences military and medical theory. Both disciplines are schools of applied philosophy; real world result is required for the philosophical principles and theoretical approaches to be validated and maintained. Ornate intellectual edifice, which cannot produce a quantifiable result, is unacceptable in both these disciplines. As such there is a cognate type of intellectual discourse that involves observation, supposition, abstraction to principle, manipulation of principle, application, and evaluation of result. This process differs from abstract philosophy wherein the application, efficacy and assessment are often couched in qualitative and unclear parameters, which belie an accurate summation of result. This paper seeks to explore the relationship of the military and medical traditions of China, through a structured comparison of the intellectual framework of these two systems of applied philosophy. By exploring the medical and military conceptualizations of space and boundary, and the cognate vocabulary used in these two traditions, a better understanding of the deep structure of the core rubrics within the systems can be derived. Further, through comparative evaluation of source texts I will examine the parallelisms and dissonances of the views of space, boundary, power, and strategy. [For the complete volume, "Proceedings of International Conference on Studies in Education and Social Sciences (Antalya, Turkey, November 11-14, 2021). Volume 1," see ED625228.]