Review Essay: Three Recent Perspectives on the Medical History of East Asia

At first glance, these three books do not have anything in common. Bridie Andrews examines transformations in Chinese medicine in mainland China from 1850 to 1960, Alexander Bay studies the debates over the etiology of beriberi (thiamin deficiency) in Japan from the late 19^th-century to the eve of the Second World War, and Sonya Grypma tells the story leading up to, and of, Canadian medical missionaries interned as “enemy aliens” of Japan in China from 1910 to 1945. How Chinese medicine became integral to Chinese modernity, how beriberi became the “national disease” of Japan, and how Japanese internment transformed the Canadian medical missionary community are questions that lead each author to travel down very different paths in the medical history of East Asia at the turn of the 20^th century up through the Second World War.

Yet, upon closer examination, there are important connections that, once made, enrich reading the three monographs together. In The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, chapter 3 on “Missionary Medicine from the West” provides the broader context that preceded what is detailed in China Interrupted. Chapter 4 on “The Significance of Medical Reforms in Japan” in the same book similarly sketches the major transformations that inform the focus of Beriberi in Modern Japan. Furthermore, the central role of medicine in state making and nation building in modern Japan (especially during wartime), which Bay persuasively outlines in his book, intersects with the consequences of Japanese imperialist ambitions in mainland China during the second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) that Andrews describes in her analysis of practitioners of both Chinese and Western medicine. Bay’s work also provides valuable context for Grypma’s accounts of Canadian medical missionaries who were interned by the Japanese in China during the Second World War.

China Interrupted developed out of Grypma’s previous book, Healing Henan: Canadian Nurses at the North China Mission, 1888–1947 (2008), by focusing on the experiences and community of one of these Canadian nurses, Betty Gale (née Thomson), who was born and raised in China as a daughter of Canadian missionaries (known as a “mishkin”) and who returned to China in 1939 as a registered nurse.¹ Not only did Gale write a detailed diary of her experiences in China through to the end of her family’s internment, but her only daughter, Margaret Gale Wightman (also a mishkin), provided Grypma with all of the letters, documents, photographs, films, books, and tape recordings related to her family’s history in China. Grypma combined these deeply personal family records with an exhaustive mining of Canadian missionary archival collections.

The monographs by Andrews and Bay, on the other hand, engage with the medical histories within China and Japan and the Chinese and Japanese scholarship related to these histories. Andrews summarizes the significance of medical missionary work in China only as it relates to her larger story on The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine. Bay does not engage with missionary history at all since the Japanese Meiji government adopted Western medicine based on the German model as early as 1874 making Western medical missions, largely irrelevant to his story about Beriberi in Modern Japan. Conversely, Grypma’s narrative about specific Canadian medical missionaries relies extensively on Protestant missionary archives and records in English but does not engage with the historical scholarship on the broader medical stage of early 20^th-century China within which these missionaries played important roles.

China Interrupted: Japanese Internment and the Reshaping of a Canadian Missionary Community

Placed firmly within the history of the United Church of Canada’s North China missionary community, Grypma...