In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China
  • Susan Mann
Yi-Li Wu . Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. xiii + 362 pp. Ill. $49.95 (978-0-520-26068-9).

Yi-Li Wu's splendid book addresses a host of significant issues in China's cultural history by focusing on "women's medicine" (fuke) at a particular point in time: the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wu's broad command of difficult Chinese classical writings is sharpened by her mastery of the cross-cultural history of medicine, placing Chinese physicians alongside their European counterparts as [End Page 286] they struggle to diagnose and treat the perilous conditions threatening mother and baby during (and following) pregnancy and childbirth. Chinese physicians explained the inner workings of the physical body using metaphors from agriculture (certain organs served as "storage depots," the fecund female body was a field requiring warmth to generate life, etc.), tracking the body's flows of vital energy through channels driven by the alternating forces of yang and yin by taking the pulse. Sickness was a state of imbalance within the body, and it was the doctor's job to figure out whether balance should be restored by supplements (to restore depletion or loss) or by purgatives (to remove blockages and stagnation); by heat-generating drugs to warm a cold body or by cooling decoctions to reduce excessive heat.

In a culture where the most unfilial act was not having a son, childbirth riveted attention on every form of medical advice at a family's disposal. The wrong diagnosis could kill a patient, and many cases from doctors' records describe the moment when the wrong diagnosis is evident—too late to save the patient, or just in time to reverse the course of treatment. Demonstrable success—especially a patient's near-death recovery—made for fame: reprintings of special herbal recipes, consultation with wealthy families, "schools" and disciples.

Into this cultural matrix Wu introduces the critical shifts in medical thinking that made the Qing period so different from the preceding centuries. The most important shift was the growing conviction that childbirth was a "natural" (p. 154) process of "cosmological resonance" (p. 216), reducing the doctor's task to monitoring and minimizing interference. Problematic labor was seen as labor forced too early, usually by an ignorant midwife or an anxious mother-in-law; prolonged periods of gestation—twelve months, four years (!)—might be necessary to bring a healthy infant successfully to term. Drugs for "securing the fetus" (p. 135) permitted an exhausted mother to sleep so that the baby stalled in the birth canal could be pushed safely back into the womb until the time was right. The conviction that childbirth was natural accompanied medical writings insisting that men's and women's bodies and illnesses were actually the same, not different: only a small cluster of disorders involving reproduction affected women alone. The universalizing (or transgendering) of these ideas of bodily health empowered literate physicians, who could not personally treat a female patient except by prescribing drugs. If men and women required the same kinds of medical attention, then the field of fuke became another field of knowledge in the larger domain of classical medicine. (As Wu stresses, all of these developments in medicine occurred in dialogue with a vigorous popular medical culture whose folkways and beliefs were disseminated by philanthropists and passed on by midwives, giving consumers a vast range of options.) When Western medicine entered Chinese literati circles at the middle of the nineteenth century, early Chinese critiques of Western science show the effects of these Qing dynasty shifts. In the view of Chinese physicians, Western gynecology's reliance on surgical treatments was no better than the lowly mechanical skill offered by a Chinese midwife, betraying the same willful disregard of the natural principles of childbirth. [End Page 287]

Wu saves her most elegant finding for her final chapter, which introduces what she calls the "infinitive body"—the universal human body apprehended by Qing literate physicians that, like a verb to be conjugated, produced "male and female, young and old, robust and delicate, Southern and...

pdf

Share