Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China

by Yi-Li Wu

This innovative book uses the lens of cultural history to examine the development of medicine in Qing dynasty China. Focusing on the specialty of “medicine for women”(fuke), Yi-Li Wu explores the material and ideological issues associated with childbearing in the late imperial period. She draws on a rich array of medical writings that circulated in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century China to analyze the points of convergence and contention that shaped people's views of women's reproductive diseases. These points of contention touched on fundamental issues: How different were women's bodies from men's? What drugs were best for promoting conception and preventing miscarriage? Was childbirth inherently dangerous? And who was best qualified to judge? Wu shows that late imperial medicine approached these questions with a new, positive perspective.

Genres: History, China, Medicine, Asia, Religion

370 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 2010

Reviews

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

key concepts learned here: initiative body (later to be inflected as the female, male, old, young bodies)
Qing imagination/knowledge of the female body: mainly as the channels of blood flow and the womb as container. Not that Chinese "doctors" don't care about the body, but they just don't understand body anamatically, rather they discuss body in terms of structures for the qi and blood to flow.
what does it mean to be a doctor, who holds the medical knowledge: hereditary doctors? literate amateurs? midwives? monks? each one draw upon a variety of sources for legitmacy: classics, medical cases, divine inspired prescriptions, practically tested prescriptions, etc ...
what is the role of print culture in the circulation and creation of medical knowledge.

A very insightful book.