Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China by Yi-Li Wu (review)

Chinese medical history is a booming academic field, and the subfield of women's medicine is flourishing. Within the last dozen years, excellent books have emerged one after another: in 1997 Francesca Bray produced Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China, an important treatise on the place of women in the history of Chinese technology; Charlotte Furth's pioneering A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960-1665, published two years later, discusses the period from the medieval to the early modern; in 2008 Lee Jen-der 李貞德 published Xingbie: shenti yu yiliao 性別，身體與醫療 (Gender, Body, and Medicine) and Nüren de Zhongguo yiliao shi: Han Tang zhi jian de jiankang zhaogu yu xingbie 女人的中國醫療史:漢唐之間的健康照顧與性別 (A History of Women's Medicine in China: Gender and Tending to Health from Han to Tang), the first studies of gynecology in ancient China. Now we have Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China, a thorough reworking of Wu Yi-Li's dissertation on fuke 婦科, or women's medicine. Extending the coverage provided by the works just mentioned, Wu focuses on the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, ending with the fall of the Qing empire. Among the author's qualities are a fine understanding of ancient medical reasoning, a pleasant writing style, and a commitment to refining our understanding of Chinese medicine.

The title of this book refers to both women's generative capacity and the reproduction of ideas about women. To that end, the author pays close attention to both social contexts and specialized medical concepts. For the former, Wu explains how nonphysicians produced and spread medical knowledge by writing and publishing—a special print culture with Chinese characteristics. She also discusses the shaping of fuke knowledge by masculine scholarship and male physicians' efforts to establish their authority over midwives. Her treatment of specialized knowledge covers the major gynecological concepts: the functions and structure of the female body, distinguishing pregnancy from illness, parturition and the culture of childbirth, and medical debates about the postpartum body.

Most significant, in her conclusion Wu rethinks Furth's explanatory models for gender and the body. A Flourishing Yin describes two models of the female body. The Song dynasty presented a distinctively female body linked with blood (which Furth sees as a broad concept worthy of a capital letter). The representative argument is that of Chen Ziming 陳自明 (1190-1270): "For women, Blood is the leader." Furth argued that along with the rise of neo-Confucianism and heightening sexual segregation, the scholarly medical discourse moved from a presentation of the body as gendered to an "androgynous body," emphasizing that both sexes exhibited attributes of both yin and yang. Wu agrees with Furth that the Song fuke physicians tended to dwell on the distinguishing attributes of the female body, whereas late imperial physicians emphasized its similarity to the male body. "Men's and women's illnesses are essentially the same," said the famous Ming dynasty physician Zhang Jiebin 張介賓 (1563-1640); the comment was routinely repeated and occurs in the imperial compilation Yi zong jin jian 醫宗金鑒 (The Golden Mirror of Orthodox Lineage of Medicine, 1742). However, in contrast to Furth, Wu proposes that there was only one model, which she calls the "infinitive body . . . one that serves as the basis for all human bodies, to be conjugated into male and female, young and old, robust and delicate, Southern and Northern, depending on circumstances" (232).

To determine how widely repeated were the statements "In women, Blood is the leader" and "Men's and women's illnesses are essentially the same" we can go to the Academia Sinica Computing Center database. When we search for records from the thirty-three selected essential medical texts, the former phrase occurs in eleven titles and thirty-seven quotations, whereas the latter phrase, when we include slight variants, occurs in seven titles and eighteen quotations. In other words, the former occurs more frequently than the latter, though...