Body, Gender, and Disease: The Female Breast in Late Imperial Chinese Medicine

Abstract

This paper examines the diverse ways in which Chinese medical experts historically gendered breast disease as a female ailment. By comparing representations of the female breast from the "Imperially-Compiled Golden Mirror of Medical Learning (Yuzuan yizong jinjian, 1742)" to those from earlier and contemporary texts, this paper analyzes how breast disease was alternately categorized as an ailment of childbearing and as a disease rooted in pathological female emotion. Medical awareness of breast disease in men did somewhat challenge these connections between womanhood and disease. Nevertheless, medical illustrations of women helped to reinforce the idea that breast disease was a characteristically female problem.