Only because of a great movement in China that has been going on for about 70 years have we been able to review the records of diseases in ancient China and publish them in a Western language. This movement has been closely allied with a revaluation of the practice of traditional Chinese medicine by those who have taken a special training in it. Many valuable works have been written in Chinese on the history of Chinese medical art and science. So far, however, all this material has remained practically unassimilated by sinologists and other Western students of Chinese culture. Thus, for example, most of the dictionary definitions in common use are quite out of date. Among the works that we have used in preparing the present contribution is the brilliant monograph of Yü Yün-hsiu on ancient nosology, or what might be called pathognostics – the recognition and classification of individual disease entities. Western historians of medicine should be aware that the treatise of Wu Lien-te and Wang Chi-min (K. C. Wong and Wu Lien-teh 1932) on Chinese medicine (nearly always the only one they know) may be described as the very small exposed piece of an iceberg, 90 percent of which is “below the surface” (i.e., in the Chinese language and therefore inaccessible to most historians of medicine). Since about the mid-1950s, the study of Chinese medicine has been revitalized; a great number of rare medical books from ancient and medieval times have been republished in photographic form, and some ancient texts have been reproduced in the modern colloquial (pai-hua) style, “translated” as it were from the ancient (ku-wen) style, either abridged or complete.