Bamboo Stone: The Evolution of a Chinese Medical Elite (review)

518 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 the latter part ofthe modern era. The moral dilemma, claims Madsen, with whom I agree, is that that era which has presumably ended is precisely what so many developing countries like China are frantically only beginning to enter. Franklin J. Woo Former Director, China Program, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Karen Minden. Bamboo Stone: The Evolution ofa Chinese Medical Elite. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University ofToronto Press, 1994. xiv, 201 pp. Hardcover $45.00. In the poem "Bamboo Stone," Zheng Banqiao draws a sharp image ofdeep bamboo roots cut into jagged mountain stone. No matter how hard the wind blows or how severe the storm, they never let go. Karen Minden uses this poem as the epigraph to her book of the same title. The physicians trained at Christian medical colleges before 1949 who continued to practice medicine in China during the political upheavals and anti-intellectual campaigns after the revolution embodied the steadfastness of the bamboo rooted in granite. They embraced the elitist model ofhigh standards in education and professionalism in practice taught in the missionary medical schools. Minden argues that the essence of the collaboration between the medical missionaries and their students continues today in the legacy of the "spirit ofinternational scientific and professional excellence" that the missionary-trained students kept alive in themselves "like a flame flickering in the wind" (p. 157). In contrast to previous studies of medical missions in China, which tend to focus on the institutions, the missionaries, and their goals,1 Minden places the Chinese alumni at center stage. Through an institutional focus on the College of Medicine and Dentistry established at the West China Union University (WCUU) in Chengdu, Sichuan, Minden examines the role ofmissionaries as agents of change in the process of transmitting Western medical knowledge to Chinese students . Missionaries created a Western-trained Chinese medical elite during the ^ ? nnt ?. t? ¦ first half of the twentieth century who then became influential leaders in the© 1995 by University' ofHawai'iPressmodernization ofthe Chinese health-care system over the course ofthe second half ofthis century. Bamboo Stone consists of seven chapters. The first four chapters, which include an introduction, focus on the institutional setting ofthe West China mis- Reviews 519 sion in Sichuan province, the perspectives ofthe Canadian medical missionaries who taught at its College ofMedicine and Dentistry, and the Chinese political context in which they practiced. The remaining three chapters focus on the Chinese students themselves who graduated from the medical college from 1900 tO 1949 and stayed in China after 1949 to work as physicians. In the fifth chapter, she examines the socioeconomic backgrounds, motivations, and campus life of the medical students from 1900 to 1949. The sixth chapter summarizes her findings on the career patterns of the alumni who stayed in China after the revolution . In the final chapter she assesses the process of technology transfer over time by evaluating the changing role ofWestern-trained Chinese intellectuals in Communist China. These last chapters move toward a China-centered approach. However, Minden does not use any sources in Chinese and never engages Chinese critics ofWestern medicine or supporters of traditional Chinese medicine during the same period.2 This is a major lacuna in her work. In the last decade , Chinese historians ofmedicine have begun to write historical analyses ofthe interaction between Western and Chinese medicine that would have given greater depth, breadth, and complexity to her case study.3 The politics ofthe merits of Western versus Chinese medicine, however, do not concern her. Minden used archival sources at the WCUU, previously kept from both Chinese and Western scholars, to construct for the first time in missionary scholarship a prosopography ofa group of Chinese medical alumni. Officials at the current university gave her a list of 131 preselected alumni. This preselected population served as her sample for both interviews and a questionnaire. She received 51 responses to the questionnaire that she sent out to 88 people. She was able to interview 93 alumni, some ofwhom also answered the questionnaire. Her population sample of 1 13 total respondents represents about 20 percent ofthe total population of 579...