  Within a Chinese historical context, medicine (yi 醫) was one of several qualitative sciences. It included “nurturing life” (yang sheng 養生), a broad category that comprised a wide range of self-cultivation techniques. In later periods, medicine also included materia medica (bencao 本草) and internal (nei dan 內丹) and external (wai dan 外丹) alchemy. The early Chinese qualitative and quantitative sciences were specific, with no unified notion of science (Sivin 1982 and 1990).