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

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.

Author: Marta Hanson
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 01/29/2013
Pages: 268
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.61d
ISBN: 9780415835350

About the Author

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.