Abstract:
The limited level of medieval technology led to a limited readership of books, especially that of medical books. For a quite long period of time the dissemination of medical books remains in a person-to-person manner. Despite efforts made by government and other social forces to fulfill a person-to-audience dissemination, little advancement was made because of technological limitation. Under such circumstances, writers of medical books tended to follow a fixed pattern of thinking, as a result of which their works were usually written in a dialogue context with a special audience. Even those large-size and significant works were of great specificity and limitation. This situation formed a certain contrast against the popularization of printing technology since the North Song Dynasty and also offers an non-negligible issue to researchers of medieval medicine and history of social disease.
