The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 by Bridie Andrews (review)

Bridie Andrews’s new book The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 aims to bring Western readers a new account of the history of modern “Chinese” medicine. Her analysis is grounded on the contemporary intellectual view that the idea of a universal and normative modernity is largely considered as an illusion of the mid-twentieth-century elite, who tended to believe that an ideal scientific “Western” medicine emerged against a nonscientific traditional “Chinese” medicine in modern China. It has been commonly thought that this modernist view of the mid-twentieth-century elite was produced objectively by judging the clinical efficacy of modern scientific medicine. But according to Andrews, it was not. Rather, this book emphasizes that it was the political imperative to defend Chinese sovereignty in the face of superior Western economic, technological, and military power that drove Chinese intellectuals, doctors, and politicians to facilitate institutional medical reforms to embrace “Western” medicine, while simultaneously building a new “Chinese” medicine.

Andrews’s book broadly covers key events in the medicine arena in China from the late Qing Dynasty to early People’s Republic of China, chronologically, including nineteenth-century missionary medicine (chap. 3), medical reforms in Japan (chap. 4), the Manchurian plague (chap. 5), and the separate trajectories of the institutionalization of “Western” and “Chinese” medicines during the Nationalist period (chap. 7). It draws particular attention to important agents involved in bringing about these changes: chapter 3 considers the nineteenth-century medical missionaries as an early example of practicing the “Western” medicine in commensurability with “Chinese” medicine and accommodation with cultural sensitivity of Chinese patients; chapter 6 examines the famous individuals who vigorously engaged in public debate, writing about or participating in medicine-related affairs, such as the iconic feminist and martyr of the 1911 Revolution, Qiu Jin, who argued for nursing as a profession for the “new woman,” and self-educated “Western” medicine evangelist Ding Fubao, whose translation of Japanese medical books had greatly shaped Republican Chinese perception of “Western” medicine. These various authors used medicine, either “Western” or “Chinese,” to argue for their own diverse political purposes: revolutionary, counterrevolutionary, feminist, or culturally conservative. Nonetheless, they were ultimately in solidarity with the concern to build modern systems of health care, sanitation, and disease control to defend Chinese sovereignty in the world at large.

Beyond scholarly medicine, this book also includes a discussion of popular healing practices in chapter 2. Through analyzing accounts offered by Chinese physician Qiu Jisheng and Scottish medical missionary John Dudgeon at the beginning of twentieth century, it provides a vivid picture of multiple and competing popular healing methods in Chinese society, which both Qiu and Dudgeon dismissed as superstitious and dangerous quackery: charms and prayers offered by temple priests and spirit mediums, folk rituals used in household healing, medical divination, and drugs sold by traveling street healers, midwives, and so on.

The adherents of “Chinese” medicine, however, in seeking to forge a new scientific medicine, endeavored to distinguish themselves from such popular healing practices by making the transmission of medical knowledge more transparent, reproducible, and teachable. For example, they initiated a movement to record their encounters with patients in Western-style case histories, which standardized essential categories/terms in practice. They also actively absorbed anatomical knowledge into acupuncture, relocating the points in relation to the structure of nerves, muscles, and blood vessels, which became the norm in Traditional Chinese Medicine acupuncture schools in mainland China.

Other books in the flourishing field of history of science and medicine in modern China include Ruth Rogaski’s Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (2004), which brilliantly analyzes multiple meanings of health and disease connecting with “modernity” in the colonial treaty-port setting, and Sean Hsiang-lin Lei’s new book Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China’s Modernity (2014), which contextualizes medical reform in Republican China in the process of state building and largely the epistemological and political...