At the beginning of this book, Volker Scheid raises the most fundamental, most daunting questions in medical history: First, what is a medical tradition? what makes us see stable structures in a world where the only constant rule is change? What maintais them in a society where medicine was not an organized profession? What gives birth to such a tradition?... It is notable in a field so largely devoted to chronicling the careers of Great Men, on in which so much labor goes into summarizing the innovations in one medical book after another without examining what aims, assumption, interests, and prejudics motivated their authors to write what they did. But Current of Tradition in Chinese Medicine grapples on every page with these practically unexamined questions, and develop as convincing a set of answers as we are likely to have for a long time.