Lisa See’s novel Lady Tan’s Circle of Women was inspired by a medical textbook published in 1511 by an eminent female doctor, Tan Yunxian. In this episode, we talk to See about how she came to write her novel and to Lorraine Wilcox, the scholar who translated the original Chinese text, about what the practice of medicine was like for a female doctor during the Ming Dynasty.
Tan was almost lost to history, but the chronicle of her cases was reprinted by a great nephew and, amazingly, one copy survived through the centuries. Through serendipitous scholarly connections, Wilcox translated it, and See used that translation as the inspiration for her novel.
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TRANSCRIPT
Lisa See: Shehe herself says in her introduction that one thing she wants is that, that women at home could use this like a cookbook. That you could actually look and see what are my symptoms, what could I make at home to treat them.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Welcome to the latest episode in our series, “Lost Women of Science Conversations,”where we talk with authors and artists who’ve discovered and celebrated female scientists in books, poetry, film, theater, and the visual arts.
I’m your host, Carol Sutton Lewis. Today, we’re exploring a fictionalized account of an actual lost woman of science from 15th-century China, Tan Yunxian. We’re joined today by the author, Lisa See, who brought Tan’s story to life, and professor Lorraine Wilcox, a scholar of Chinese medicine. who translated the original medical text, which included a chronicle of the recipes Tan successfully used to treat women.
Lorraine translated Tan Yunxian’s original book, “Miscellaneous Records of a Female Doctor,” and it was by pure chance that Lisa discovered it, got in contact with Lorraine, and decided to use Tan’s story as the inspiration for a novel about what the life of a female physician in Ming Dynasty China would have looked like.
Lisa’s book is called “Lady Tan’s Circle of Women.” The actual Tan Yunxian was an elite woman born into a family of doctors. Tan may not have been the only female doctor of her time, but she was unique because she was one of the few who wrote about her patients. In her original book of cases, Tan writes about treating women from her elite circle within her family compound and women from lower classes like concubines and other working women.
Her medical writing is filled with intriguing details about these women’s lives. And they gave Lisa the starting point for many of the episodes in the novel. At the heart of it, the book tells a captivating story of women helping other women through medicine and in life, and paints a picture of what it would have taken to break free of traditional gender roles of the time.
And now we’re going to dive into it all with Lisa and Lorraine. Welcome to you both.
Lisa See: Thank you for having us.
Lorraine Wilcox: Thank you.
Carol Sutton Lewis: So let’s start with you, Lisa, and how you came to write this book. You have a great story about how you discovered Tan Yunxian during the pandemic. Can you tell us what happened?
Lisa See: Yes, I had actually been working on another idea, and the problem with that particular idea was, um, I couldn’t do the research for it.
All the libraries closed, the research libraries closed, archives closed, China, of course, was closed. And so I had put that aside. And I have to say, I was really at loose ends. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Many months went by with just my husband and me alone in lockdown, and there was this one day I was walking through my office and on one of the walls, I just, it’s all research books, and the spine of one of those books jumped out at me.
I don’t know why. Gray jacket with slightly darker gray lettering, but it’s like it flew off the shelf and into my hands. “Reproducing Women, Pregnancy, and Childbirth in the Ming Dynasty.” And I thought to myself, you know, well, here we are in the middle of a pandemic, my life as I know it is over, I might as well sit down and start reading it right now.
And I got to page 19, and there was a mention of this woman, Dr. Tan Yunxian. Who had practiced 500 years ago and had written a book of her cases. I set that book down, went over to my computer, looked her up and discovered that her book was still in print. Not just in Chinese, but also in English. And so, although usually I think about books and ideas for five, 10, 15, 20 years.
The one I’m working on now, 30 years, I’ve been thinking about it. This one was all of about 26 hours.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Wow. And so you had the book, you read the book. Where did you go from there? And what led you to reach out to Lorraine?
Lisa See: Well, same thing, you know, everything is still closed. The libraries, the research libraries, archives, China, still closed.
And I knew that I was going to have to do the research for this in a very, very different way than I had in the past. One of the first people I tried to find was Lorraine and I’m looking on the internet and I’m looking all around. She could have been anywhere in the world, but it turned out she lived in Culver City, uh, where we actually happened to be this very moment.
And uh, that’s about 20 minutes from my house. So out of all the places in the world, she was very close by. This was still long before vaccines. And so we couldn’t meet in person, but we did meet on Zoom. Oh, sometimes a couple times a week. And Lorraine would send me unpublished dissertations, medical journal articles, a note saying so and so is giving a lecture in Singapore on midwifery, you should watch it, and I’d be up at two in the morning watching it, but she was so incredibly helpful with providing just materials, but also putting me in contact with a lot of people who had written about traditional Chinese medicine, who were practitioners, one scholar who had written about the history of midwifery in China and her own mother had been a midwife. So Lauren was, you know, hugely, hugely helpful.
Carol Sutton Lewis: And Lorraine, as an expert in Chinese medicine and the translator of Tan Yunxian’s book, “Miscellaneous Records of a Female Doctor,” what was your reaction when your neighbor, Lisa, approached you?
What did you think when she proposed writing a fictional account of Tan Yunxian’s life?
Lorraine Wilcox: So the phone rang and this female voice said, Hi, I’m Lisa See. I’m looking for Lorraine Wilcox. And I’m going like, Oh my God, oh my God, Lisa See. I’ve read all your books. Except I’m not saying that out loud. That’s the part I kept quiet at the time.
And so I was just really excited. And, and when I was translating Tan, I just had such a strong feeling that she wanted to be known. And so I was just glad if she could get more widely known through, you know, a novel is much more likely than my book, which, you know, hardly sells anything is very niche. So I was excited for it.
Carol Sutton Lewis: But how did you find her book to begin with?
Lorraine Wilcox: So there was this scholar named Charlotte Furth, who was a professor of history at USC. Um, she’s since passed, a few years ago, but I had become an acquaintance of hers and we talked about this kind of stuff. We talked about foot binding. We talked about women doctors.
We talked about, you know, all kinds of stuff like this. And she had found the manuscript. There’s like apparently just one copy in the whole world, the original copy of her book in a rare books library in Beijing. And she had found it quite a few years before and taken photos of every page and used it in writing her book, um, which is called “A Flourishing Yin.”
And she gave me like a Xerox copy of the photos of it. And so I had to type it all up and try to figure out the punctuation, which is hard because they didn’t punctuate back then—in Europe either. And it sat on my shelf for a very long time, but one day it just called to me and I just started, like, I typed up the first case and translated it and I thought, wow, this is good.
And I just kept going. And, and then I really felt like she wanted, she wanted someone to do this, not necessarily me. So, I did it.
Lisa See: And can I just add, you know, there are these forewords that are written by different men in her family and a couple of afterwards written by different men. And after Tan died, you know, she died at 96 years old. That’s pretty remarkable. It may show that she was a pretty good doctor.
Her book had kind of fallen away from the marketplace. I mean, this happens to the best of us, you know, books go out of print, but she did have a great nephew, I believe it was, who wanted to save her book from oblivion. And he looked all around and he kept searching and searching. And finally, he found a copy. He transcribed it. He paid to have the woodblocks printed. He paid to have it published. And this is the copy that. Lorraine is talking about that’s the one that survived to today.
But one of the things he said in this afterward was it’s pretty much like may her name live on in perpetuity and yet there still was about 500 years where she did disappear and then to come back like this and I think that this goes very much to what you’re doing with this show which is how do we recognize that there were women in the past?
And pretty long ago, five, you know, five centuries ago, who were participating in medicine, who were in her own way, I think, doing some research and experimenting with her different remedies. You know, the book is made up of the successful cases. She doesn’t throw in the ones that didn’t work. So for her to get to that place, you know, of, Oh, you’re going to use a, I’m not going to use the Chinese measurements, but a half a teaspoon of this and a cup of that.
And, you know, et cetera. She had to have done a lot of experimenting herself with remedies that had already been around for a long time.
Carol Sutton Lewis: This leads me to Lisa to ask you, can we talk a little bit about Tan and her work as you depicted in the novel, but with its actual historical reference, can you talk a little bit about what she did as a doctor and why it was unique for a woman at that time. What was her practice of medicine?
Lisa See: So she was an elite woman from a very well educated pretty important family of Imperial scholars, so this is not just a regular, you know, woman right off the bat. Her grandfather, when she was eight years old, and this is in her book and her own writing, liked to drink wine at night and have her recite classical poetry to him.
So, this is an eight-year-old already doing that. And one night, I guess, after a couple of glasses of wine, he was reputed to have said, this girl is too smart to confine her to embroidery. We’re going to teach her my medicine. And, in fact, she really learns more from her grandmother, but it never would have happened, I don’t think, if he hadn’t given this seal of approval.
So, again, an elite family, you know, once she goes to her husband’s home, you’re, you’re living in a kind of a big compound with, you know, 40 to 100 of your husband’s relatives, plus all the servants who take care of you. So, her cases are the women and girls pretty much who live in that compound. You know, the description will start out is there’s a little girl who’s the daughter of a concubine in a, in a well-placed household.
So, you know, or there’s a servant girl who works in the kitchen in a high-level household. So she, you know, the assumption is, nobody knows for sure, is that most of those cases are the women and girls who live in the, in the compound. She does have a couple of other cases. And these were the ones that, you know, when I first read the book, just absolutely intrigued me.
And, made me realize that there’s a story here. One had to do with a woman who held the tiller on a ship, on a boat, and the other one was a brick and tile maker. And I thought, well, at this time, you know, Confucian thought, is sort of, permeated everything, society, culture, family. And Confucius had a lot of thoughts about women.
He was a great philosopher, but he didn’t care a whole lot for women. And so he had these sayings like an educated woman is a worthless woman. A good woman will never go more than three steps beyond her front gate. So this was the thing that absolutely captivated me. If this was an elite woman who was never supposed to go beyond her front gate, how did she meet the tiller woman? How did she meet that brick and tile maker?
Carol Sutton Lewis: That leads me directly to my next question, which is that you have so beautifully fictionalized the story. I mean, because you can’t know the answer to that and you had to create it. The more I learn about Tan and understand how real a person she actually was, the more I wonder how you were able to keep the balance, how you were able to fictionalize parts and keep parts in reality and create parts without losing track of the actual story.
I mean, was it difficult to stay true to the story you had while desiring to create the fictional world around it?
Lisa See: Yes, very difficult, actually. Um, so there’s not a whole lot that’s known about her. You know, there’s, again, that the sort of introductions written by some male relatives, what she herself wrote, uh, the couple of things at the very end.
So it’s very skimpy. There is information in the text itself as she talks about particular cases, you know, because she gives a description of each patient, what’s ailing that person, what her remedy is, how to make it and what the result is. So within there, there, you know, each case, there is a story, but this was not enough.
And so I did a lot of research about, uh, medicine in that time and very particularly, medicine for women. So, you know, there was a lot of old medical texts that have survived, most of them written by men. And at that time, in traditional Chinese medicine, in this elite level, right, male doctors couldn’t actually see their female patients, so a male doctor would sit behind a screen or a curtain, maybe be out in a hallway, and the husband or father would act as a go-between asking questions.
So the, the male doctor couldn’t see what a woman looked like. He couldn’t directly necessarily feel her pulses in Chinese medicine. There’s 28 basic pulses, you know, he couldn’t necessarily smell her. We know that so many ailments have odors attached to them. And, of course, he couldn’t ask questions, but that doesn’t mean that male doctors weren’t interested in these bodies.
And so there’s a lot of material out there that has survived to today of these male doctors trying to figure out women’s bodies without necessarily getting to see them. And they had different philosophies about how you should treat a woman who’s, you know, pregnant, what to do when she gives birth, how to take care of her afterwards.
So I was able to use all of that, this sort of, other material and other cases and so without giving too much away the case of the worm—the story where a message is written on the baby’s foot and what happens to the midwife at the Forbidden City, those all happened to real women. Those were all real cases.
However, they were not her cases.
Carol Sutton Lewis: More after the break on the collaborative process.
Mid-roll]
Carol Sutton Lewis: Can you talk to me a little bit about your collaborative process, how you two work together during the pandemic and beyond? Lorraine, I know you must have provided a lot of historical background, but how did you work together to ensure that particularly the aspects of Chinese medicine, which are really detailed so well, was both historically accurate and also accessible to readers who didn’t have a familiarity with it?
Lorraine Wilcox: I think Lisa already has a big familiarity with that. So it’s not like I had to tutor her on a lot. You know, there were a few things I said, don’t use this because it wasn’t common at that time.
Lisa See: Examining the tongue.
Lorraine Wilcox: The tongue diagnosis was not used at that time, even though it’s very common today. Um, so that developed later in the history of Chinese medicine.
So there were a few things I said stay away from, but I mean, we had conversations about how could this work out? How could they do this? You know, I go into all the details about the herbal formulas and where it came from, and what this herbal strategy was. I really wrote it technically, not as a storytelling.
Lisa See: The other thing as far as the medicine, I think there may even be a disclaimer on page one of like, don’t try this at home. I never put the entire recipe for one of her remedies. I think all together in the whole book, I only use 12 herbs because first of all, there are hundreds of them out there, and most of them are things that readers would not have heard of before, and so to try to narrow it down so that, oh, the next time you hear about Angelica, you’ve heard about it already before, you know, that it starts for a reader, I mean, I start as a reader myself, you know, first, will I understand this, will I remember it, 50 pages later, and so by focusing more on those herbs that were very specific to remedies for women and you were really helpful with that too, I think, you know, helping me narrow down so that readers and, me first, wouldn’t just get completely lost.
Carol Sutton Lewis: I’m glad you said that because I was already taking notes from some of the remedies in the book. So I know not to actually try to employ them. So I want to just take a little step back and, and focus on Tan, the actual doctor, and about the rarity of her, certainly in that time. There were two things that seemed to be incredible to me.
One was that she had generations before her of medical knowledge that she was able to apply and that she wrote it down. Is it a fair statement to say there weren’t that many medical texts floating around at that time written by women?
Lisa See: I think that would be a very fair assessment. But I’d also say that that would be a fair assessment of the world at large, that there weren’t very many women physicians.
If you, again, think about this, the late 1400s in the Americas, you know, there might have been medicine, men and women, there might have been shamans, but there was nothing like a trained like official training to become a doctor. So, you know, put aside whether there were any women, there weren’t any men who were being, you know, I think there’s a tradition in a tribe where you learn from your father. I mean, I don’t want to diminish that aspect of, you know, like indigenous culture and how things get passed down, but it’s not 5,000 years of Chinese medicine that has been passed from generation to generation with a lot of writing.
Lorraine Wilcox: I’m not so sure because one of the things that Charlotte Furth pointed out to me was that, you know, today we look down on somebody who’s illiterate, but back then, literacy was so uncommon everywhere in the world, and that people who were illiterate might be incredibly talented. And in China, there’s a huge emphasis on memorization, and then write things into poetry that would be bad poetry, but it would encode the information into poems.
And, and so in the Americas, there may have been, not the literacy, but there may have been huge traditions that were passed down orally. And, and there may have been amazing training, but there’s no record of it.
Lisa See: Right. Yeah. That’s what I was trying to say. And of course, there, you know, there, we do know that there are a lot of things in indigenous medicines, whether they’re from the Americas or other parts of the world that we know are effective today, and many of them used in pharmaceuticals. Digitalis is an example.
Carol Sutton Lewis: So for our listeners who have not yet read the book, can you explain the difference between a literate doctor and a hereditary doctor? And talk a little bit about how Tan was a hereditary doctor.
Lisa See: So a hereditary doctor has a family tradition that’s passed down, and it’s often kept very secret, um, so that have like recipes, you know, formulas for various conditions that were passed down through the family.
And they may have like encoded their family tradition into poetry that would be memorized. But even if somebody got a hold of the poem, there would be part that had to be taught in person so they could keep things very secret that way. And then the literate tradition, you know, there are lots of medical texts that had been written, you know, going back to Huangdi Nejing, which was written in the Han dynasty around, you know, well, 1500 years before that.
But some people had both traditions. So Tan’s grandfather apparently married into a medical family of Tan’s grandmother and studied medicine with them. And so you know, Tan’s grandmother was in hereditary medicine and Tan received that, but she also was highly literate and read all the medical texts in, in the, you know, translation.
She’s always quoting that she got this from this book. She got that recipe from some other book. And these are real books, you know, that I could go look up. the recipe, um, that she was mentioning. So she didn’t always list all the ingredients. She just said, I took this recipe from this book and then I could go find that ancient book and find the recipe.
So she had both the family tradition and literate scholarly tradition.
Carol Sutton Lewis: And so despite the secretive nature that sometimes was very much a part of this medical training, Tan wrote about it and publicized it. Do you think that that was? In part, because of its focus on women, and since she was so rare to be a woman who had this training, she felt obligated to make it available for others.
Lorraine Wilcox: Most of her book, she’s quoting from medical texts. Even though she talks about studying with her grandmother, she never says, here’s a hereditary recipe from my grandmother.
Lisa See: But she herself says in her introduction that one thing she wants is that, that women at home could use this like a cookbook, you know, that they could use it.
They’d have to be able to read, obviously, but let’s say you’re far from another doctor or you don’t like that male doctor, that you could actually look and see what are my symptoms or what are my, you know, what are my children’s symptoms here? What could I make at home to treat them? And so in that way, I think it’s really interesting because she wasn’t, this wasn’t meant necessarily for other doctors. It was really meant to be used, I think, you know, by women who may not have had access to medical care.
Lorraine Wilcox: She also in one, I don’t remember if it was a postscript or introduction, she says that she’s hoping that others would correct her errors, but that may just be like a humble, polite thing. Um, or she may really have been looking for more input.
Lisa See: But again, I think that what makes that book so interesting is that the cases are very, very different—specific to women and girls. And so how do you treat women and girls? One thing we haven’t touched on is the tradition in Chinese medicine to think about emotions. And going back to this idea, an elite family where the male doctors may not be able to have direct interaction with the patient, but she could talk to women, her patients, really woman to woman.
I mean, she had been through every physical phase of a woman’s life. She’d been a little girl. She went through puberty. She gave birth to four children. She went through menopause. She lived to be 96. I mean, she, you know, went through all those old age things too. So she had experienced that herself, but that that’s purely physical.
But on the emotional level, And remember, these are women in, in elite families who are really shut off from the world and they’re living, you know, spending their days with other wives, their mothers-in-law, the sisters-in-law, the concubines, the spinster aunts, you know, all these women all together in one, basically one room. And how hard that would have been emotionally, I mean, I’m just speaking for myself, that would be, that would have been really hard for me, you know, bless my mother-in-law’s soul, she’s in a better world now, wherever that is, but it would not have been a pretty picture for the two of us to live together for 40 years. It would have been really hard.
Carol Sutton Lewis: With your role being expressly subservient to her.
Lisa See: Subservient forever. And so, that ability for her to connect on an emotional level, uh, joy, happiness, all, you know, those good things. But really, so many ailments, and we know this today, and it’s much more accepted today that have an effect on our physical health. So anger, jealousy, resentment, she had experienced those herself.
And I think she could, at least in my reading of her cases, could relate to those emotions and recognize them in her patients. And then think about, okay, I’m seeing this as part of the, um, the case, and how am I going to treat it?
Lorraine Wilcox: And treat them as valid. I mean today somebody will say I see you when you bury your heart to them and they’ll say I see you and she saw her patients and like I really like translating case studies. And I’ve translated a book by one of her contemporaries, a doctor named Shweji that he wrote on, like basically female medicine, gynecology, but other things that women have.
And, you know, he’ll basically say, Oh, this woman is sick because she’s angry. And then he had just, that was that. And Tan says she was angry because her husband was getting, you know, a concubine and she felt there was nothing she could do. Or she’d say, this person has deep sorrow or, and she’d explain why.
I mean, she saw her patients, whereas the male doctors were just like, yeah, women are angry. This woman is angry.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Now, Lisa, you say that three themes run through your novels, stories about women that have been lost, forgotten, or sometimes deliberately covered up. So would you consider Tan Yunxian to be a lost woman of science?
Lisa See: Oh, for sure. I mean, I think for sure she was lost for a long time. I mean, she was lost right after she died. And then her, you know, great nephew saved that one, her book, but then again, disappeared for another, we’ll say 450 years, let’s say. And before Charlotte Furth is in a, you know, medical library in China and stumbles across it and takes some photos of it, and then years before she gives that to Lorraine, years before Lorraine figures out, Hmm, I think I’d like, you know, translate this and publish it, and then more years before that book practically fell off the shelf, uh, in the middle of the pandemic and here was this mention and then that set me on my path. And I think something Lorraine said earlier is really true; that there’s something about this woman where it’s as if she was longing for people to find her. That she was like calling out.
And even though she was, you know, really had disappeared, that she found her way back into public consciousness. And then you just the uniqueness of what she did as a woman of science 500 years ago.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Just a final question for the both of you. What do you hope that readers take away from Lady Tan’s story?
Lorraine Wilcox: It is a story that hasn’t been told, and there are probably hundreds like her, maybe certainly not as many as men who write case studies, but, you know, there, there has to, she can’t be the only one in her time period, she’s just the only one that, by some chance, her book happened to survive, and, so we get a picture from a different time period, and we get a picture from a female point of view, so, it really is a window into what women themselves thought.
Lisa See: Yeah, and I, I agree with that. And I’d also say that just generally, we learn history, you know, what I think of as like the front line of history, the wars, the dates, the generals, the presidents, the prime ministers, very male version of history. But if you take one step back, who’s there? It’s women, it’s children, it’s families.
And they’re there every step of the way. Now, we often hear, certainly when I was growing up and in school, you know, there were no women writers, there were no women artists, there were no women architects, there were no women chefs, and there were no women fill in the blank. But of course, there were women who were doing those things.
I mean, we could go through every profession. It’s just that so often their work was lost, forgotten, deliberately covered up. And what I hope when people read Tan Yunxian’s story is that they are inspired by her, that for what she did in her time, we can learn so much, I think, and be inspired so much by these women who came before us. Whether it’s in the arts, whether it’s in science, that we get to do what we do today because those women came before us and we’re, we’re literally standing on their shoulders.
Carol Sutton Lewis: Lisa See. Lorraine Wilcox, thank you so much for your time.
Lisa See: Thank you.
Lorraine Wilcox: Thank you.
Carol Sutton Lewis: The novel is “Lady Tan’s Circle of Women,” by Lisa See, based on Tan Yunxian’s original book, “Miscellaneous Records of a Female Doctor,” translated to English by Lorraine Wilcox. This has been Lost Women of Science Conversations.
This episode was hosted by me, Carol Sutton Lewis. Gabriela Saldivia was our producer and our sound engineer for this episode. Thank you to our senior managing producer, Deborah Unger, our project manager, Eowyn Burtner, and our co-executive producers, Amy Scharf and Katie Hafner. The episode art was created by Lily Whear, and Lizzie Younan composes our music.
Thanks to Jeff DelViscio and our publishing partner, “Scientific American.” “Lost Women of Science” is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. We’re distributed by PRX. If you’ve enjoyed this conversation, please go to our website, lostwomenofscience.org, and subscribe so you never miss an episode.
That’s lostwomenofscience.org. Oh, and don’t forget to click on the donate button. That helps us bring you even more stories of important female scientists. I’m Carol Sutton Lewis. See you next time.
Host
Carol Sutton Lewis
Producer
Gabriela Saldivia
Guests
Lisa See
Lisa See is the award-winning author of eleven novels, including Lady Tan’s Circle of Women, and a memoir, On Gold Mountain about her Chinese American family. Born in Paris, she grew up in Los Angeles, where she still lives.
Lorraine Wilcox
Lorraine Wilcox, PhD, is an experienced translator of Chinese medical texts and an accomplished author on Chinese medicine topics. Her translation of Tan Yunxian’s Miscellaneous Records of a Female Doctor was published in 2015.
Further Reading
Lady Tan’s Circle of Women. Lisa See. Scribner, 2023
Miscellaneous Records of a Female Doctor. Tan Yunxian. Translated by Lorraine Wilcox with Yue Lu. Chinese Medicine Database, 2015
Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China. Yi-Li Wu. University of California Press, 2010
A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China’s Medical History, 960–1665. Charlotte Furth. University of California Press, 1999
