Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945-63


Book Description

Kim Taylor looks at the transformation of Chinese medicine from a marginal, sidelined medical practice of the early 20th century, to an essential and high profile part of the national health-care system under the Chinese Communist Party.







Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945-1963


Book Description

Using original sources, this significant text looks at the transformation of Chinese medicine from a marginal, side-lined medical practice of the early twentieth century, to an essential and high-profile part of the national health-care system under the Chinese Communist Party. The political, economic and social motives which drove this promotion are analyzed and the extraordinary role that Chinese medicine was meant to play in Mao Zedong's revolution is fully explored for the first time, making a major contribution to the history of Chinese medicine.




Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945-1963


Book Description

This book describes the transformation of Chinese medicine from a marginal, side-lined medical practice of the mid-twentieth century, to an essential and high-profile part of the national health-care system under the Chinese Communist Party.




Mass Vaccination


Book Description

"Mass Vaccination comfortably establishes itself as the leading and indeed essential monograph on the history of vaccination in modern China; a much-needed contribution to the history of medicine that will undoubtedly become a textbook in our age of vaccine wars, but which by far surpasses the historiographical needs of the moment by delivering a nuanced and systematic history of mass vaccination in the world's most populous and increasingly powerful country." ― International Journal of Asian Studies While the eradication of smallpox has long been documented, not many know the Chinese roots of this historic achievement. In this revelatory study, Mary Augusta Brazelton examines the PRC's public health campaigns of the 1950s to explain just how China managed to inoculate almost six hundred million people against this and other deadly diseases. Mass Vaccination tells the story of the people, materials, and systems that built these campaigns, exposing how, by improving the nation's health, the Chinese Communist Party quickly asserted itself in the daily lives of all citizens. This crusade had deep roots in the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, when researchers in China's southwest struggled to immunize as many people as possible, both in urban and rural areas. But its legacy was profound, providing a means for the state to develop new forms of control and of engagement. Brazelton considers the implications of vaccination policies for national governance, from rural health care to Cold War-era programs of medical diplomacy. By embedding Chinese medical history within international currents, she highlights how and why China became an exemplar of primary health care at a crucial moment in global health policy.




Reproductive Realities in Modern China


Book Description

Lasting from 1979 to 2015, China's One Child Policy is often remembered as one of the most ambitious social engineering projects to date and considered emblematic of global efforts to regulate population growth during the twentieth century. Drawing on a rich combination of archival research and oral history, Sarah Mellors Rodriguez analyses how ordinary people, particularly women, navigated China's shifting fertility policies before and during the One Child Policy era. She examines the implementation and reception of these policies and reveals that they were often contradictory and unevenly enforced, as men and women challenged, reworked, and co-opted state policies to suit their own needs. By situating the One Child Policy within the longer history of birth control and abortion in China, Reproductive Realities in Modern China exposes important historical continuities, such as the enduring reliance on abortion as contraception and the precariousness of state control over reproduction.




Principles of Chinese Medicine


Book Description

"As the world's most comprehensive and deeply researched system of alternative and complementary medicine, Chinese medicine enjoys a large following in scientifically developed communities. Yet its concepts and principles have been shrouded in mystery and obscure language. This path-breaking book strips this ancient science of its mystique and metaphysical pretentions and interprets it to strike common ground with biomedical science. Concepts like qi and meridians are interpreted not as physical entities, but as constructs to facilitate diagnosis and therapy using heuristic models. Written for medical professionals, philosophers of medicine and discerning readers interested in holistic therapies, the book offers a unique perspective of Chinese medicine in an advanced biomedical world. It has practical chapters on cardiovascular disease, irritable bowel syndrome and cancer, and a compilation of Chinese herbs. This second edition of the acclaimed Theory of Chinese Medicine has new material on chronic diseases and the intriguing possible convergence of biomedicine and TCM."--




Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine is an extensive, interdisciplinary guide to the nature of traditional medicine and healing in the Chinese cultural region, and its plural epistemologies. Established experts and the next generation of scholars interpret the ways in which Chinese medicine has been understood and portrayed from the beginning of the empire (third century BCE) to the globalisation of Chinese products and practices in the present day, taking in subjects from ancient medical writings to therapeutic movement, to talismans for healing and traditional medicines that have inspired global solutions to contemporary epidemics. The volume is divided into seven parts: Longue Durée and Formation of Institutions and Traditions Sickness and Healing Food and Sex Spiritual and Orthodox Religious Practices The World of Sinographic Medicine Wider Diasporas Negotiating Modernity This handbook therefore introduces the broad range of ideas and techniques that comprise pre-modern medicine in China, and the historiographical and ethnographic approaches that have illuminated them. It will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Chinese studies, and the history of medicine and anthropology. It will also be of interest to practitioners, patients and specialists wishing to refresh their knowledge with the latest developments in the field. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license




The Spirit of Selflessness in Maoist China


Book Description

Assuming power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party was soon faced with a crucial problem: how to construct the socialist 'New Man'? Using Foucault's theory of 'technologies of the self', Lynteris examines the conflict between self-cultivation and the abolition of the self in the biopolitically neuralgic field of 'socialist medicine'.




The Politics of Chinese Medicine Under Mongol Rule


Book Description

Under the rule of the descendants of Chinggis Khan (1167-1227), China saw the development of a new culture in which medical practice came to be considered a highly respected occupation for elite men. During this period, further major steps were also taken towards the codification of medical knowledge and promotion of physicians’ social status. This book traces the history of the politics, institutions, and culture of medicine of China under Mongol rule, through the eyes of a successful South Chinese official Yuan Jue (1266-1327). As the first comprehensive monograph on history of medicine in China under the Mongols, it argues that this period was a separate moment in Chinese history, when a configuration of power different from that of previous and succeeding periods created its own medical culture. The Politics of Chinese Medicine under Mongol Rule emphasizes the impact of the political and institutional changes caused by the Mongols and their collaborators on the social and cultural history of medicine, which culminated in the medical theory of Zhu Zhenheng (1282–1358), still influential in East Asian medicine. Using a variety of Chinese-language sources including gazetteers, legal texts, biographies, poems, and medical texts, it analyses the roles of the Mongols and West and Central Asians as cultural brokers and also as unifiers of China. Further, it views North and South Chinese elites as agents of historical change rather than as victims of Mongol oppression. Underlining the complexity of the history of China under the Mongols and the significance of time and geography for the study of this history, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese medical history, Chinese social and cultural history, and medieval global history.