Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine - Disease and the Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China

Zusatztext "Marta Hanson's thorough research into the process of change in Chinese medicine is well worth a place on practitioners' bookshelves." - Nancy Holroyde-Downing! The Journal of Chinese Medicine! February 2012."A groundbreaking work on the history of Chinese epidemiology... rather than simply being a rich description of a long neglected aspect of Chinese medicine! Hanson's book engages in a powerful analysis of the material at hand...Hanson's book stands as a most significant contribution to understanding epidemiological theory and practice in Imperial China. At the same time! it provides social historians and anthropologists of medicine with a new focus on spatiality and the 'geographic imagination' of disease. This demonstrates clearly that far from being confined to Hippocratic or Western-colonial medicine! the territorialisation of disease constitutes a significant governmental apparatus for non-western imperial and state formations." - Christos Lynteris! University of Cambridge! 2013."Informative! rewarding reading for anyone interested in the history of medicine! of science! or of China in general. Summing Up: Highly recommended." Choice Informationen zum Autor Marta Hanson is Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University, USA. Her research interests are in the history of medicine, disease, and public health in China and the cultural history of Chinese arts of memory. Klappentext 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. Zusammenfassung This book traces the history of the Chinese concept of "Warm diseases" ( wenbing ) from antiquity to the SARS epidemic. Following wenbing from its birth to maturity and even life in modern times Marta Hanson approaches the history of Chinese medicine from a new angle. She 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 her book 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. The persistence of wenbing and other Chinese disease concepts in the present can be interpreted as resistance to the narrowing of meaning in modern biomedical nosology. Attention to conceptions of disease and space reveal a previously unexamined discourse the author calls the Chinese geographic imagination. Tracing the changing meanings of "Warm diseases" over two thousand years allows for the exploration of pre-modern understandings of the nature of epidemics, their intersection with this geographic imagination, and how conceptions of geography shaped the sociology of medical practice and knowledge in late imperial China. Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine opens a new window on interpretive themes in Chinese cultural history as well as on contemporary studies of the history of sc...

Product details

• Authors: Marta Hanson
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd.
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 01.07.2011
• EAN: 9780415602532
• ISBN: 978-0-415-60253-2
• No. of pages: 288
• Series: Needham Research Institute Series
• Subjects: Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Medicine > General; Social sciences, law, business > Ethnology > Folklore