Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia

Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia
Author: Qizi Liang
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 347
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822348268

Examines the intersections of power, culture and science that went into the struggle to overcome disease and improve people's health in Chinese regions of 20th century East Asia.

Rural Health Care Delivery

Rural Health Care Delivery
Author: Yi Hu
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2013-12-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3642399827

Diseases are everyday, ordinary occurrences intimately related to people’s daily lives. However, as the metaphor of the “Sick Man of East Asia” emerged against the backdrop of a weak modern China, health care and the curing of diseases were turned into grand state politics with far-reaching implications. This book, starting with the argument for diseases being metaphors, describes and interprets such incidents in China’s history as the Abolishment of Traditional Chinese Medicine, the Patriotic Hygiene Campaign and the Cooperative Medical Services. In an effort to reveal the internal logic of disease politics in the transformation of the state-people relationship, the book analyzes key aspects including the politicization and inclusion of diseases in state governance, the double disciplining of hygiene, legitimacy construction of the state, the remaking of the nationals, and the expansion of the “publicness” of the state. The book argues that disease politics in modern China has developed following the path from nationals to the people, and then to citizens, or from crisis politics and mobilization politics to life politics. In addition, a marked change has occurred in China’s state building: increasingly standard, rationalized and institutionalized means have been employed while the non-standard means, such as large-scale mobilization and ideological coercion, had been historically used in China.

Gender, Health, and History in Modern East Asia

Gender, Health, and History in Modern East Asia
Author: Angela Ki Che Leung
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2017-11-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 9888390902

This groundbreaking volume captures and analyzes the exhilarating and at times disorienting experience when scientists, government officials, educators, and the general public in East Asia tried to come to terms with the introduction of Western biological and medical sciences to the region. The nexus of gender and health is a compelling theme, for this is an area in which private lives and personal characteristics encounter the interventions of public policies. The nine empirically based studies by scholars of history of medicine, sociology, anthropology, and STS (science, technology, and society), spanning Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from the 1870s to the present, demonstrate just how tightly concerns with gender and health have been woven into the enterprise of modernization and nation-building throughout the long twentieth century. The concepts of “gender” and “health” have become so commonly used that one might overlook that they are actually complicated notions with vexed histories even in their native contexts. Transposing such terminologies into another historical or geographical dimension is fraught with problems, and what makes the East Asian cases in this volume particularly illuminating is that they present concepts of gender and health in motion. The studies show how individuals and societies made sense of modern scientific discourses on diseases, body, sex, and reproduction, redefining existing terms in the process and adopting novel ideas to face new challenges and demands. “Whether reviewing the comparative national histories of birth control, debating early cases of transsexual surgery, or highlighting the resurgence of ‘traditional’ Asian medical commodities, this volume provides accessible and productive studies on these intriguing topics in Asia. Scholars of modern East Asia and indeed anyone concerned with the analysis of gender and health in light of intersecting postcolonial studies will find the book rewarding.” —Rayna Rapp, New York University “A bold and important volume that explores the interweaving of gender, body, and modernity throughout East Asia. With vivid articles on sexuality, reproductive technologies, and sexual identities, the book opens multiple possibilities for how ‘Asia as method’ can shine new light on persistent theoretical questions from biopower to biocitizenship.” —Ruth Rogaski, Vanderbilt University

Hygienic Modernity

Hygienic Modernity
Author: Ruth Rogaski
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2004
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0520283821

Placing meanings of health and disease at the center of modern Chinese consciousness, Ruth Rogaski reveals how hygiene became a crucial element in the formulation of Chinese modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rogaski focuses on multiple manifestations across time of a single Chinese concept, weisheng—which has been rendered into English as "hygiene," "sanitary," "health," or "public health"—as it emerged in the complex treaty-port environment of Tianjin. Before the late nineteenth century, weisheng was associated with diverse regimens of diet, meditation, and self-medication. Hygienic Modernity reveals how meanings of weisheng, with the arrival of violent imperialism, shifted from Chinese cosmology to encompass such ideas as national sovereignty, laboratory knowledge, the cleanliness of bodies, and the fitness of races: categories in which the Chinese were often deemed lacking by foreign observers and Chinese elites alike.

Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine

Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine
Author: Vivienne Lo
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 796
Release: 2022-06-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 1135008973

The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Medicine is an extensive, interdisciplinary guide to the nature of traditional medicine and healing in the Chinese cultural region, and its plural epistemologies. Established experts and the next generation of scholars interpret the ways in which Chinese medicine has been understood and portrayed from the beginning of the empire (third century BCE) to the globalisation of Chinese products and practices in the present day, taking in subjects from ancient medical writings to therapeutic movement, to talismans for healing and traditional medicines that have inspired global solutions to contemporary epidemics. The volume is divided into seven parts: Longue Durée and Formation of Institutions and Traditions Sickness and Healing Food and Sex Spiritual and Orthodox Religious Practices The World of Sinographic Medicine Wider Diasporas Negotiating Modernity This handbook therefore introduces the broad range of ideas and techniques that comprise pre-modern medicine in China, and the historiographical and ethnographic approaches that have illuminated them. It will prove a useful resource to students and scholars of Chinese studies, and the history of medicine and anthropology. It will also be of interest to practitioners, patients and specialists wishing to refresh their knowledge with the latest developments in the field. The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

Epidemics in Modern Asia

Epidemics in Modern Asia
Author: Robert Peckham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2016-04-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1316546179

Epidemics have played a critical role in shaping modern Asia. Encompassing two centuries of Asian history, Robert Peckham explores the profound impact that infectious disease has had on societies across the region: from India to China and the Russian Far East. The book tracks the links between biology, history, and geopolitics, highlighting infectious disease's interdependencies with empire, modernization, revolution, nationalism, migration, and transnational patterns of trade. By examining the history of Asia through the lens of epidemics, Peckham vividly illustrates how society's material conditions are entangled with social and political processes, offering an entirely fresh perspective on Asia's transformation.

Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine

Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine
Author: Marta Hanson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2012-03-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1136816429

"This book is the biography of a Chinese disease. Born in antiquity and reaching maturity during the epidemics that swept China during the seventeenth-century collapse of the Ming dynasty, the ancient notion of wenbing Warm diseases continued to play a role even in the response of Traditional Chinese Medicine to the outbreak of SARS in 2002-3. By following wenbing from its birth to maturity and even life in modern times this book approaches the history of Chinese medicine from a new angle. It explores the possibility of replacing older narratives that stress progress and linear development with accounts that pay attention to geographic, intellectual, and cultural diversity. By doing so it integrates the history of Chinese medicine into broader historical studies in a way that has not so far been attempted, and addresses the concerns of a readership much wider than that of Chinese medicine specialists"--Provided by publisher.

Public Health in Asia and the Pacific

Public Health in Asia and the Pacific
Author: Milton J. Lewis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2007-10-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1134240562

The Asia-Pacific region has not only the greatest concentration of population but is, arguably, the future economic centre of the world. Epidemiological transition in the region is occurring much faster than it did in the West and many countries face the emerging problem of chronic diseases at the same time as they continue to grapple with communicable diseases. This book explores how disease patterns and health problems in Asia and the Pacific, and collective responses to them, have been shaped over time by cultural, economic, social, demographic, environmental and political factors. With fourteen chapters, each devoted to a country in the region, the authors take a comparative and historical approach to the evolution of public health and preventive medicine, and offer a broader understanding of the links in a globalizing world between health on the one hand and culture, economy, polity and society on the other. Public Health in Asia and the Pacific presents the importance of the non-medical context in the history of human disease, as well as the significance of disease in the larger histories of the region. It will appeal to scholars and policy makers in the fields of public health, the history of medicine, and those with a wider interest in the Asia-Pacific region.

Public Health and National Reconstruction in Post-War Asia

Public Health and National Reconstruction in Post-War Asia
Author: Liping Bu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2014-08-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317964462

This book, based on extensive original research, considers the transformation of public health systems in major East, South and Southeast Asian countries in the period following the Second World War. It examines how public health concepts, policies, institutions and practices were improved, shows how international health standards were implemented, sometimes through the direct intervention of transnational organisations, and explores how indigenous traditions and local social and cultural concerns affected developments, with, in some cases, the construction of public health systems forming an important part of nation-building in post-war and post-independence countries. Throughout, the book relates developments in public health systems to people’s health, demographic changes, and economic and social reconstruction projects.

Public Health and the Modernization of China, 1865-2015

Public Health and the Modernization of China, 1865-2015
Author: Liping Bu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2017-07-14
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 1317541359

This book, based on extensive original research, traces the development of China’s public health system, showing how advances in public health have been an integral part of China’s rise. It outlines the phenomenal improvements in public health, for example the increase in life expectancy from 38 in 1949 to 73 in 2010; relates developments in public health to prevailing political ideologies; and discusses how the drivers of health improvements were, unlike in the West, modern medical professionals and intellectuals who understood that, whatever the prevailing ideology, China needs to be a strong country. The book explores how public health concepts, policies, programmes, institutions and practices changed and developed through social and political upheavals, war, and famine, and argues that this perspective of China’s development is refreshingly different from China’s development viewed purely in political terms.