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. In the century that followed, pressure to reform traditional medicine in China came not only from this small clutch of Westerners, but from within the country itself, as governments set on modernization aligned themselves against the traditions of the past, and individuals saw in the Western system the potential for new wealth and power. 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.

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

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

"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