Full Description
This collection expands the history of colonial medicine and public health by exploring efforts to overcome disease and improve human health in Chinese regions of East Asia from the late nineteenth century to the present. The contributors consider the science and politics of public health policymaking and implementation in Taiwan, Manchuria, Hong Kong, and the Yangzi River delta, focusing mostly on towns and villages rather than cities. Whether discussing the resistance of lay midwives in colonial Taiwan to the Japanese campaign to replace them with experts in "scientific motherhood" or the reaction of British colonists in Shanghai to Chinese diet and health regimes, they illuminate the effects of foreign interventions and influences on particular situations and localities. They discuss responses to epidemics from the plague in early-twentieth-century Manchuria to SARS in southern China, Singapore, and Taiwan, but they also emphasize that public health is not just about epidemic crises. As essays on marsh drainage in Taiwan, the enforcement of sanitary ordinances in Shanghai, and vaccination drives in Manchuria show, throughout the twentieth century public health bureaucracies have primarily been engaged in the mundane activities of education, prevention, and monitoring.Contributors. Warwick Anderson, Charlotte Furth, Marta E. Hanson, Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, Angela Ki Che Leung, Shang-Jen Li, Yushang Li, Yi-Ping Lin, Shiyung Liu, Ruth Rogaski, Yen-Fen Tseng, Chia-ling Wu, Xinzhong Yu
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Hygienic Modernity in Chinese East Asia / Charlotte Furth 1
Part I. Tradition and Transition
The Evolution of the Idea of Chuanran Contagion in Imperial China / Angela Ki Che Leung 25
The Treatment of Night Soil and Waste in Modern China / Yu Zinzhong 51
Sovereignty and the Microscope: Constituting Notifiable Infectious Disease and Containing the Manchurian Plague (1910-11) / Sean Hsiang-lin Lei 73
Part II. Colonial Health and Hygiene
Eating Well in China: Diet and Hygiene in Nineteenth-Century Treaty Ports / Shang-Jen Li 109
Vampires in Plagueland: The Multiple Meanings of Weisheng in Manchuria / Ruth Rogaski 132
Have Someone Cut the Umbilical Cord: Women's Birthing Networks, Knowledge, and Skills in Colonial Taiwan / Wu Chia-Ling 160
Part III. Campaigns for Epidemic Control
A Forgotten War: Malaria Eradication in Taiwan, 1905-65 / Lin Yi-ping and Liu Shiyung 183
The Elimination of Schistosomiasis in Jiaxing and Haining Counties, 1948-58: Public Health as Political Movement / Li Yushang 204
Conceptual Blind Spots, Media Blindfolds: The Case of SARS and Traditional Chines Medicine / Marta E. Hanson 228
Governing Germs from Outside and Within Borders: Controlling 2003 SARS Risk in Taiwan / Tseng Yen-fen and Wu Chia-Ling 255
Afterword: Biomedicine in Chinese East Asia: From Semicolonial to Postcolonial? / Warwick Anderson 273
Timeline 279
Glossary 283
Bibliography 287
Contributors 323
Index 327
