Angela Ki Che Leung, ed. Medicine for Women in Imperial China. Leiden, Brill Academic, 2006. 212 pp., illus. $86. Medicine for Women in Imperial China. Leiden, Brill Academic

Abstract

This welcome and essential contribution to the history of obstetrics and gynecology in China is a reprint of a thematic issue of Nan Nü: Men, Women, Gender in China (vol. 7, no. 2, 2005). As Angela Leung observes, historians have been investigating Chinese “medicine for women” (fuke, nüke, chanke) for close to a century now. It is only in the last two decades, however, that a critical mass of socially and culturally informed studies has emerged, and many fundamental issues remain to be investigated. This present volume showcases recent scholarship on the period from the third century BCE to the ninth century CE, and it will certainly generate further interest in this vital but less-understood period in the development of Chinese medicine for women. Later centuries have been well-surveyed, most notably by Charlotte Furth's seminal study, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960–1665 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). We thus know that “the department of women's diseases” became a distinct subfield of classical, scholarly medicine during the Song Dynasty (960–1279), constructed around an explicit model of gender difference shaped by Neo-Confucian cosmology. Here “blood” (xue) became the marker of womanhood, and its health or pathology was the key to understanding women's diseases.