Charlotte Furth

Concepts of pregnancy, childbirth, and infancy in Ch'ing Dynasty China.

I deas about gender organize the social relations between men and women. They gain their power because they seem to be the products of a natural order of things, deeper than any social conventions. Reproductive processes, like eating and drinking, sickness and death, appear as part of the biological substratum of human experience, operating according to universal laws that apply to all human beings and to other living creatures as well. Older practitioners of the history of science, when confronted with the bewildering variety of customs, rituals, and medical aids surrounding childbirth in remote times and places, usually recorded these as superstition or the products of naive empiricism. The consequent interpretation of the history of medicine as the gradual replacement of error by science retains its positivist appeal even today.

Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century

This collection expands the history of colonial medicine and public health by exploring efforts to overcome disease and improve human health in Chinese regions of East Asia from the late nineteenth century to the present. The contributors consider the science and politics of public health policymaking and implementation in Taiwan, Manchuria, Hong Kong, and the Yangzi River delta, focusing mostly on towns and villages rather than cities. Whether discussing the resistance of lay midwives in colonial Taiwan to the Japanese campaign to replace them with experts in “scientific motherhood” or the reaction of British colonists in Shanghai to Chinese diet and health regimes, they illuminate the effects of foreign interventions and influences on particular situations and localities. They discuss responses to epidemics from the plague in early-twentieth-century Manchuria to SARS in southern China, Singapore, and Taiwan, but they also emphasize that public health is not just about epidemic crises. As essays on marsh drainage in Taiwan, the enforcement of sanitary ordinances in Shanghai, and vaccination drives in Manchuria show, throughout the twentieth century public health bureaucracies have primarily been engaged in the mundane activities of education, prevention, and monitoring. Contributors . Warwick Anderson, Charlotte Furth, Marta E. Hanson, Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Angela Ki Che Leung, Shang-Jen Li, Yushang Li, Yi-Ping Lin, Shiyung Liu, Ruth Rogaski, Yen-Fen Tseng, Chia-ling Wu, Xinzhong Yu