The implications of gia truyen: Family transmission texts, medical authors, and social class within the healing community in Vietnam

In Vietnamese medicine, gia truyen ("family recipes") refers to a set of texts, primarily in chu nom (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 truyen in the 19th and 20th centuries. It suggests that prior to the 1920s, gia truyen were written anonymously to protect the author's identity in the face of the Nguyen dynasty's repression of chu nom writing. In the 1920s, precisely at the time that han-nom writing was being eclipsed by education in French and quoc ngu (Romanized Vietnamese), Vietnamese medical practitioners experienced a renaissance in the writing of chu nom gia truyen. Moreover, chu nom writing in the gia truyen genre continued until at least the 1990s.