Apparatus XY

40The emphasis on the body over the mind then is the more common treatment option for male and female doctors. While counter-emotional therapy was conducted, more common treatment options placed medicinal cures employed moxibustion, acupuncture and herbal remedies. These approaches to healing indicate a more encompassing attitude in medical practice and philosophy towards disordered depression. Women felt more conformable and found it easy to speak with other women about their mental health issues. When compared to Tan Yunxian, Wang Ji's accounts of his female patients were focused on the problem and not the patient. A female healer was a socially acceptable person to speak to, where Wang Ji as a male was not. According to his medical accounts, Wang Ji primarily used drug therapies on both male and female patients (Grant 149). Again the main concern of female morality and modesty played a large part in the ability of doctors to treat female depression patients. Conducting counter emotional therapy would have involved discussing present situations in the home or with the female patient. Evidence suggested the physician Wang Ji had fewer women than men come to him, partly due to modesty constraints. When women did seek his advice, they wrote him a letter or went through an intermediary family member (Grant 115). These barriers to treatment then translate to a lack of acknowledgment of disordered depression. It was only when a disordered depression's physical manifestations worsened that women would seek the help of male physicians and their treatments.

Conclusions

41I want to end with probing the question of treatment further by hypothesizing what might have happened to the real life poet Shen Yixiu (1590-1635), whose probable depression I detailed in section one. In her poems, she details her sorrow over the deaths of her son and two daughters, seemingly the reason for her depression as I argued with the help of the outlined five criteria. However, Miss Shen does not give any details regarding treatments for her "sorrows" or if she even sought help from healers. The limited biographical notes provided by the writers of the Red Brush, the volume in which I found her poems, also provide no medical details. They state that after her children died, Miss Shen's "spirit was wounded and her heat had perished: wracked by sorrow, she wasted away and after three years, she too passed away" (Idema and Grant 385). There is no mention as to whether she sought any type of treatment over those three years.

42What would have been Miss Shen's options for assistance concerning her depression and bereavement? One, that she would have relied first on the female members of her household to help her as they had the closest and first contact with all illnesses in the house. For example, there is a brief mention that Miss Shen nursed her one daughter Qiongzhang at home as she was there the moment her daughter died (Idema and Grant 384). This does not seem to be an unusual thing for a mother to do, and details on her care were not divulged in the poems because a woman caring for others was such a common thing. Two, that in case Miss Shen resorted to self help, she might have chosen poetry as a way of dealing with her pain. As she wrote in the last three years of her life, there must have been some emotional release from poety. I hypothesize this based on what other poets such as Zhen Shuzhen, who states outright in her poem "Self-Reproach, Two Poems," that she tries to cheer herself up through writing poetry (256). Thirdly, if this did not work, then Miss Shen may have gone to see a female healer. As mentioned earlier in regards to Wang Ji, women sought other women first to obtain help for their physical and mental illnesses. If Miss Shen had gone to Tan Yuxian, a female doctor, she would have a sympathetic ear to consult. Miss Tan would have treated her with medicine or moxibustion, focusing on metabolic function of the digestive system, and aromatic herbs to restore and warm Miss Shen's qi.

43Fourthly, when Miss Shen did not improve and her health became worse, her husband might have sent for a male doctor, like Wang Ji, as he was also alive during the Ming dynasty. If she had, the doctor would have focused on her physical ailments, which were detailed in her poems as sorrow, anxiety, sleeplessness, and lack of food intake. She had grown thin and tired as well. The doctor then would have given her herbal remedies as well. It is doubtful she would have expressed her deep emotions to him, as he was a male physician and women seem not to have used them as confidents, as indicated by the case studies of many doctors above. There is also a minute chance Miss Shen experienced counter-emotional therapy, although it seems not to have been common practice.

44However, all of this assistance may not have worked or may not have been sought. It is very difficult to tell, as we have no real evidence that she even went to a physician. We have one bit of evidence that her husband did have some experience in seeking medical help for his wife and his daughters. Ye Shaoyuan in the preface to his daughter Wanwan's poems quotes a passage on sorrow, saying that there was little anyone could do about it, and "moxibustion and acupuncture needles cannot dissolve it" (Idema and Grant 407). By including this quote, Ye seemed to have some connection to these ideas, and probably had tried to seek medical attention for his wife and daughters. As well, he also re-states his believe that sorrow and depression are "persistent and in-exhaustible." As a result, it is doubtful that Miss Shen could have been helped with a seemingly disordered depression because women were rarely treated for this mental disorder in traditional China.