Special Section on Gender and Medicine

Abstract

Special Section on Gender and Medicine Marta Hanson Two articles in this issue of Late Imperial China pay intellectual tribute to the illuminating scholarship on the history of gender and medicine in China of Charlotte Furth. Yi-Li Wu's contribution, "Body, Gender, and Disease: The Female Breast in Late Imperial Chinese Medicine," carries out an unpacking of the layers of meaning of the diseased and lactating breast comparable to that done by Furth for the gendering of blood and the body in Chinese medical history. Hsiu-fen Chen's analysis, "Between Passion and Repression: Medical Views of Demon Dreams, Demonic Fetuses, and Female Sexual Madness in Late Imperial China," does for the gendering of emotions, dreams, and madness among non-reproductive women—nuns, widows, and spinsters—what Furth did for our understanding of the history of women, gender, and reproduction in late imperial Chinese medicine. Before Furth turned her attention to comparable subjects in the cultural history of Chinese medicine, however, she started her career in the 1960s in intellectual history at Stanford, where in 1966 she finished a dissertation on the geologist and public intellectual Ding Wenjiang. The resulting book, Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China's New Culture (Harvard, 1970), approached the British-educated scientist as a modern-day scientific positivist and elite technocrat who also had a Confucian ethic of social responsibility. She argued that his approach to western science as a type of epistemology helped shape the "new culture" of the May 4 movement. After this book, she developed an interest in the nexus of science, politics, and reform among Chinese conservatives of Ding's generation. This led to the edited volume Limits of Change: Conservative Alternatives in Republican China (Harvard, 1976). Her chapter on "Intellectual Change: From the Reform Movement to the May Fourth Movement, 1895-1920" in the Republican Era volume 12 of the Cambridge History of China (1983) also developed from her initial research questions. While she was a Fulbright fellow in China from 1981 to 1982, however, her interests shifted to both the deeper past of late imperial China and the literate medical tradition. Her shift from intellectual and political to social and cultural history, engagement with feminism, and work on kinship, gender, [End Page 49] and sexuality during the Ming-Qing periods resulted from engagement with the broader transformations in history from the 1970s to the 1980s. This analytic reorientation also dovetailed with her role as co-editor with James Lee of Late Imperial China for eight years from 1985-93. Her prodigious scholarship on gender and medicine culminated in A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History 960-1665 (Stanford, 1999). The rich Chinese tradition of medical case histories she mined for this monograph became the subject of an even broader synthesis of "case reasoning" in the co-edited volume on Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History (Hawai'i, 2007). After eighteen years of teaching in the Department of History at the University of Southern California in 2008 she became Professor Emerita of Chinese history. This transition in her position, however, has not decreased her intellectual contributions to the field through editing the work of others or publishing her own. Co-edited with Angela Leung, Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Public in the Long Twentieth Century (Duke, 2010), once again expands our collective vision, provides a new synthesis, and opens yet further paths of productive inquiry. [End Page 50] Marta Hanson Department of History of Medicine Johns Hopkins University Copyright © 2011 Society for Qing Studies and The Johns Hopkins University Press