This project explores Tan Yunxian's journey of becoming a female doctor in the Ming dynasty. Among all the surviving Ming medical books, Tan Yunxian's medical case book is the only one that was written by a woman. It seems natural, considering she had both scholar-official and medical family backgrounds. Yet, social expectations consider it more suitable for a lady to remain in the household, and not treat patients outside. To legitimize Tan Yunxian's pursuit of a medical career, she applied several strategies to resolve potential criticism toward her and her family. These strategies are analyzed through her autobiographical preface in her medical case book. The project also explores Ming male literatis' perspectives toward Tan Yunxian, the factors that contributed to the preservation and publication of her medical case book, and examined her medical cases under the social-historical and micro-history contexts.

What does it mean to take animal autobiography seriously and how can we account for the representation of life-narrating animals? The article investigates animal autobiographies as ‘literary autozoographies’, drawing attention to both the generic contexts and the epistemological premises of these texts. Adopting a double-bind approach stemming from autobiographical research as well as cultural animal studies, the article focuses on early nineteenth-century equine autozoographies from the German-speaking tradition. These texts are discussed exemplarily in relation to the parameters of fictional autobiographies, before they are contextualized with historical discourses regarding horses in natural history and so-called ‘horse-science’. Due to the fact that the poetics and aesthetics of the genre are modeled on the templates of factual autobiographies, the article argues that literary autozoographies can be read as fictional autobiographies as well as meta-auto/biographical discourse undermining autobiographical conventions. Furthermore, it shows that literary autozoography and zoology share a common historical and ideological epistemology accounting for the representation of animals in both fields. Literary autozoographies thus participate in the negotiation and production of species-specific knowledge. Reading Life of the Mecklenburg Mare Amante (1804), Life of a Job Horse (1807) and Life of a Worn-Out Hack (1819) alongside equine-centric discourses around 1800, the article demonstrates in what ways these texts can be regarded as part of a regime of knowledge attributing emotions and cognitive capacities to horses, while simultaneously arguing for humane treatment on the basis of interspecies homologies.

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