9780774824330_cover Enlarge Cover
0 of 5
0 ratings
rated!
rated!
list price: $32.95
edition:Paperback
also available: Hardcover
category: History
published: Jan 2015
ISBN:9780774824330
publisher: UBC Press

The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850-1960

by Bridie Andrews

tagged: china, alternative medicine, history
Description

Medical care in nineteenth-century China was spectacularly pluralistic: herbalists, shamans, bone-setters, midwives, priests, and a few medical missionaries from the West all competed for patients. This book examines the dichotomy between “Western” and “Chinese” medicine, showing how it has been greatly exaggerated. As missionaries went to lengths to make their medicine more acceptable to Chinese patients, modernizers of Chinese medicine worked to become more “scientific” by eradicating superstition and creating modern institutions. Andrews challenges the supposed superiority of Western medicine in China while showing how “traditional” Chinese medicine was deliberately created in the image of a modern scientific practice.

About the Author

Bridie Andrews

Contributor Notes

Bridie Andrews is an associate professor of history at Bentley University and teaches history of medicine at the New England School of Acupuncture. She has co-edited two books, Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge (1997) and Medicine and Identity in the Colonies (2003).

Awards
  • Short-listed, ICAS Book Prize, International Convention of Asia Scholars
Editorial Reviews

"The great merit of this book is that Andrews not only has extensively researched her topic, working with a broad range of primary and secondary sources, but also reads her materials critically."

— Asian Medicine

[The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960] present[s] a number of astute insights that promise to remain authoritative in the field for years to come … Andrews’s discussion of the advent of scientific acupuncture provides a sorely needed historical explanation for its contemporary survival and popularity.

— Journal of the History of Medicine
X
Contacting facebook
Please wait...