Representing Healers in Early Modern China: Doctors were traditionally farcical characters or butts of humor in Yuan and Ming drama and fiction, and my paper traces the radical transformation of the physician in the mid- and late-Qing into hero, protagonist and savior of the empire. Literati were looking for ways to reclaim the moral and intellectual authority they had been promised as students of the classical curriculum, but which had been denied them by economic and political forces beyond their control. I argue that the doctor figure was a way to ameliorate this trauma by embracing the fact that many literati had been forced into the practice of medicine after failing to secure official appointment. The previous generation of literati authors of fiction imagined that a return to Confucian ritualism would rescue that status for them, but given its failure, elevating the figure of the doctor, at least in fiction, to superhero as an active scholar, a renaissance man of sorts, and selfless practitioner of humane virtues was the next such attempt. The opium wars and disastrous rebellions of the last decades of the nineteenth century made it clear that China was not going to bring the entire world under the sway of Confucianism, and as a result, doctors in fiction at the very end of the Qing are cast as more modest heroes, but models for modern literati nonetheless. The Berlin medical manuscripts provide a great deal of historical context for this analysis.