It has long been noted that religious practitioners in China specialized in varied forms of healing. However, only a handful of book-length studies give exclusive, extended attention to this aspect of Chinese therapeutic culture (Maspero 1981; Gai 2001; Strickmann 2002; Sakade 2007), ' making Lin Fushi's recent collection of essays a welcome addition. Developing from his previous work on Han Dynasty and Six Dynasties shamans (Lin 1994, 2004), the collection provides a systematic overview of the medical activities of religious figures and sects in the late Han Dynasty and Six Dynasties.? Covering a broad variety of indigenous religious practitioners and sects, the essays are both insightful and entertaining, filled with anecdotal narratives from hagiographic, historical, and zhiguai (tales of the strange) literature. The contribution is the application of the medical gaze to religion; Daoist studies specialists may find that while Lin draws on much of the major scholarship on his sources, his use of it is flat and does not engage the primary issues of dating or identification in Six Dynasties Daoism. The volume will be of particular interest to specialists in Daoist studies, the history of medicine, and Six Dynasties history, but others in the history of the body and the history of qi will also find it useful.
