In late imperial China, debates over how virtuosity in medical practice might be cultivated unfolded within a world that connected physicians to scholars, poets, calligraphers, Buddhist monks, Daoist life-cultivation experts and military strategists. This book traces these debates, showing how medicine was imagined as akin to poetry, how clinical insight was shaped through meditative bodily practices and how practitioners pursued empirical investigation. At the same time, medicine and the body became vital conceptual resources for intellectuals seeking to address broader social and philosophical questions