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History China

The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850-1960

by (author) Bridie Andrews

Publisher
UBC Press
Initial publish date
Apr 2014
Category
China, Alternative Medicine, History
  • Hardback

    ISBN
    9780774824323
    Publish Date
    Apr 2014
    List Price
    $95.00
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780774824330
    Publish Date
    Jan 2015
    List Price
    $32.95

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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 is an associate professor of history at Bentley University and teaches the history of medicine at New England School of Acupuncture. She has co-edited two books, Western Medicine as Contested Knowledge (with A.R. Cunningham, Manchester University Press, 1997) and Medicine and Identity in the Colonies (with Mary P. Sutphen, Routledge, 2003).

Bridie Andrews' profile page

Awards

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

Editorial Reviews

[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

"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