Category: Arts & Humanities, Image, Chinese, China
Results
History of Medicine The National Library of Medicine (NLM) holds approximately 2,000 volumes of Chinese medical classics. Here we display a few of the earliest and most interesting texts from the NLM collection. Also included are portraits of a few significant figures in early Chinese medicine whose contributions range from acupuncture to the pioneering uses of herbal medicines to the concept of Yin and Yang. Through the exhibit, we hoped to draw attention to a fascinating part of NLM's historical resources. 23 October 2009
About the Collection In September 2005, UW-Madison Professor Emeritus Tse-Tsung Chow (who died in 2007) and his wife Nancy Wu Chow donated over 120 calligraphic and painted Chinese scrolls and fans, ranging from the 18th through the 20th centuries, to the Special Collections Department of the UWM Libraries. Professor Chow's collection is an invaluable addition to Special Collections, offering primary examples of Chinese culture spanning a two-hundred year period, with didactic applications in a broad range of disciplines at UWM, including art, art history, history, geography, foreign languages and linguistics, and international studies.
The Fine Arts Library currently houses 2,602 individual East Asian rubbings, the majority of which are from China. The rubbings were made from ancient stone stelae, tomb tablets, Buddhist and Daoist scriptures on stelae and rocks, as well as inscriptions and designs copied from bronze vessels, jade objects, ceramics, tomb bricks, and roof tiles, objects dating from the Qin Dynasty (221-207 BCE) to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 CE).
About the Collection The C. V. Starr East Asian Library's run of Ling long women's magazine is one of the most complete outside China, acquired, we believe, in the late 1930s or early 1940s as part of a concerted effort to enlarge Columbia University's Chinese-language holdings. The collection expanded dramatically in the years between 1938 and 1941 when the holdings more than doubled, thanks to a special grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Chinese Paper Gods Collection Essays The images in this collection were assembled by Anne S. Goodrich (1895–2005) in 1931, when as a Christian missionary in Peking she became interested in local folk religious practices. She studied the paper gods in this collection for much of her life. After publishing her research conclusions in 1991, she donated these prints to the C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Columbia University. The images are divided initially by usage: Those which were purchased to be burned immediately and serve as emissaries to heaven; and those which were purchased to be displayed for a year while offering protection to the family in a variety of ways, before being burned. The images are further divided by display locations and by the deities they represent.
