The implications of gia truyền

Abstract

In Vietnamese medicine, gia truyền (“family recipes”) refers to a set of texts, primarily in chữ nôm (demotic Vietnamese characters), that preserves local knowledge about how practitioners in a specific family-based medical circle could use various plants and other materia medica to cure disease. This article traces the history of the transmission of gia truyền in the 19th and 20th centuries. It suggests that prior to the 1920s, gia truyền were written anonymously to protect the author’s identity in the face of the Nguyễn dynasty’s repression of chữ nôm writing. In the 1920s, precisely at the time that hán-nôm writing was being eclipsed by education in French and quốc ngữ (Romanized Vietnamese), Vietnamese medical practitioners experienced a renaissance in the writing of chữ nôm gia truyền. Moreover, chữ nôm writing in the gia truyền genre continued until at least the 1990s.