Mapping Local Medical Testimony in Madness Adjudication in Eighteenth-Century China
Overview
This pilot digital humanities project explores how local physicians participated in the adjudication of madness-related homicide cases in eighteenth-century Qing China. Drawing from over fifty criminal cases documented in the Xingke tiben (Routine Memorials on Criminal Matters) housed in the First Historical Archives in Beijing, the project traces the geographic distribution and legal use of unofficial medical testimony during a period often described as the “High Qing.”
Data Collection and Methodology
- Sources: Qing criminal archives (Xingke tiben)
- Tool for Annotation: Tropy
- Tagged all references using the keyword “医” (physician/healer)
- Created annotations for each case
- Structured Dataset: Includes practitioner name, location, case number, year, and medical testimony
- Spatial Referencing:
- Location data retrieved from CHGIS
- Historical base map: 1820 Qing dynasty map (GBK-encoded) overlaid on modern administrative map via ArcGIS
Digital Mapping
Using ArcGIS, I visualized the spatial placement of these cases, allowing me to:
- Trace the regional distribution of local physicians
- Reveal clusters of reliance on medical testimony
- Investigate how medical knowledge was incorporated into legal decision-making
What’s Next
The next stage of this project aims to expand the dataset to include all identifiable local physicians involved in madness adjudication across the eighteenth century. This will support my broader argument:
Local physicians played a crucial role in legal adjudication not only because of their expertise, but also because of systemic vacancies in official medical posts at the county level.
To test this, I will:
- Use the Basic Local Gazetteers Database (Jiben fangzhi ku, Airusheng)
- Identify counties with vacant medical bureau posts
- Visualize these vacancies with ArcGIS
- Compare maps of medical bureau understaffing and reliance on local physicians
By overlaying this vacancy map with the mapped locations of local physicians who provided legal testimony, I aim to show that these unofficial healers often stepped in to fill structural gaps in state capacity. The spatial convergence of medical bureau vacancies and reliance on unofficial testimony offers new evidence for understanding how legal and medical authority intersected in late imperial China.
Text Mining and Visualization of Chinese History
Overview
The project explores the shifting discourse of feminine virtue in imperial China by analyzing the frequency and context of four key terms—貞 (chastity), 孝 (filial piety), 節 (restraint/virtue), and 死 (death)—in the Lienü zhuan (Biographies of Exemplary Women) sections found in thirteen Chinese dynastic histories, from the Book of the Later Han to the Draft History of Qing.
Methodology
This project analyzes the Lienü Zhuan (列女傳, Biographies of Exemplary Women) sections from thirteen official Chinese dynastic histories. All texts were sourced from the Chinese Text Project (CTP) and 國學導航.
To prepare the corpus for text mining in Voyant Tools:
- Cleaning: Removed editorial punctuation, footnotes, and navigation markers to retain only the original classical text.
- Encoding: Saved all files as .txt in both UTF-8 and GBK formats to test compatibility with different tools. (UTF-8 for Voyant)
- Formatting: Standardized filenames (e.g., 01_LaterHan_Lienu.txt) and grouped files into a .zip archive for upload.
- Upload: Imported the archive into Voyant.
Outcome
What’s Next
Building on the preliminary frequency analysis of virtue terms in the Lienü Zhuan (列女傳, Biographies of Exemplary Women), the next stage of this digital humanities project focuses on the differentiated deployment of the virtue xiao (孝, filial piety) across gendered social roles specifically:
- 孝婦 (filially pious daughter-in-law)
- 孝女 (filial daughter)
- 孝妻 (filial wife)
Using the Context tool in Voyant (the linked window below), this phase will extract and tabulate every instance of these compound terms from the Lienü Zhuan sections of thirteen Chinese official histories. Each occurrence will be organized by source, dynastic period, narrative function, and neighboring lexical patterns.
This analysis aims to uncover how virtue was linguistically encoded into gendered moral expectations, offering a corpus-driven approach to understanding the narrative construction of feminine exemplarity across dynasties.