In this heaven, healing is an office set against an office. The served witness runs through the celestial "Ministry of Medicine", a bureau of the sky answering the crowded Ministries of Epidemics and Exorcism that fill the same chapter. At its head the record sets "the King of Remedies, Yao Wang", and above him a trio of mythical sovereigns — "Fu Hsi, Shên Nung, and Huang Ti" — named "a sort of ancestral triad of medicine-gods". Fu Hsi earns his place by discovery rather than by cure: it is his finding of "the _pa kua_, or Eight Trigrams" — the eight divinatory figures — by whose mystical power, the record holds, the Chinese physicians work upon "the minds and maladies of their patients."

The chapter's liveliest healer, though, is a dead scholar. In a fevered dream an emperor watches a small demon plunder his palace until a great one appears, tears out the sprite's eye and eats it, and names himself "Chung K'uei, Physician of Tung-nan Shan in Shensi" — a man who, cheated of first place in the examinations, had killed himself on the palace steps and sworn to guard the throne. At his coming "the fever had left him", and the grateful emperor has the demon-queller painted from memory. So the healer here is also "the Protector against Evil Spirits": to cure is to drive something out.

This shelf rests on the single 1922 compilation Myths & Legends of China. The record also files a god of healing among Irish, Greek, Hindu, and Hawaiian witnesses, but none of those is wired to served text today; only the Chinese ministry can be read. When medicine and exorcism are filed side by side as neighbouring bureaus, where exactly does the physician end and the priest begin?