This paper explores the relationships between "traditional Chinese forensic medicine" and "traditional Chinese medicine," a topic long of considerable interest to historians. The analytic strategy employed here is to examine how, in traditional society, so-called traditional Chinese forensic medicine was read, practiced, and classified bibliographically. First, in traditional bibliographies, the relevant books are categorized under the "legalist school" (fajia). On the other hand, experts in traditional Chinese medicine denied that "forensic medicine" was a part of their knowledge. Second, the practitioners of "traditional Chinese forensic medicine" were mainly magistrates and wuzuo (the Chinese-style coroner), rather than physicians. Furthermore, the contents of the relevant legal codes, which defined the dynamics of forensic practices, reveal differences from modern Western forensic medicine. Based on these observations, this paper then evaluates the views of previous scholars regarding the relations between "traditional Chinese forensic medicine" and "traditional Chinese medicine." In sum, historians have neglected the fact that while these two modes of learning shared the same research object, they focused on different aspects. Thus, I argue the roots of the debates lie in two factors. After the modernization, the taxonomy of Chinese knowledge was changed; and as well, modern scholars unconsciously used the premises of modern medical knowledge to study traditional Chinese medicine, even though the two differed in focus and scope.