Male brushstrokes and female touch: medical writings on childbirth in Imperial China
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is a study of Shichan lun (Ten Topics on Birth), a widely disseminated medical treatise produced in the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), around the early twelfth century. Shichan lun records how childbirth progressed and it also contains detailed descriptions of hand techniques deployed by women practitioners during birth complications. I examine its composition, incorporation into a larger work (in the thirteenth century), and redaction (ca. early to mid-sixteenth century). In Chapter One, I translate and analyze the earliest extant edition of Shichan lun, collected in Chen Ziming's Furen daquan liangfang (All Inclusive Good Prescriptions for Women, pub. 1238). I highlight the use of childbirth pain descriptions as a diagnostic "tool" during delivery and the hand techniques women practitioners used to manage birth complications. In Chapter Two, I provide a composite biography of the author of Shichan lun, Yang Zijian (fl. 1100), and analyze the reasons why a literatus came to write about childbirth in the early twelfth century and his literary network. Chapter Three is devoted to the study of Chen Ziming (fl. 1237-1271), who incorporated Shichan lun into his work. I examine Chen's authorial impulse and evaluate his involvement in re-defining women's medicine. Chapter Four is a study of the changes introduced by Xue Ji (1487-1558), the sixteenth century medical author, to Chen Ziming's work and Shichan lun. My conclusion addresses how Shichan lun, a work of a technical and practical nature, resisted theoretical incorporation, and the problems of using male-authored sources to study women's medicine and women practitioners.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it