  In conclusion, this brief account addresses important issues in the connections between Chinese philosophy and the development of Chinese medicine. Philosophical texts clearly influenced medicine in several ways. First, both are grounded in theories of qi, yin-yang and wuxing and microcosm-macrocosm analogies based on them. However, as in the case of science more generally, philosophical textualists emerged as a distinct social group from the fang shi, especially. Nonetheless, we can trace philosophical concerns in several areas of medical interest, especially the ongoing history of “nurturing life” (yang sheng) practices, first described in philosophical texts but elaborated in great and practical detail by physicians and alchemists such as Ge Hong, Tao Hongjing and Sun Simiao. This linkage is made explicit by one of the greatest of China’s twentieth-century physicians and medical reformers, Zhang Xichun, who unequivocally describes philosophy as the basis of medicine.