Yi-Li Wu, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China

Abstract

Yi Li-Wu's book, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor and Childbirth in Late Imperial China, is an excellent addition to the growing fields of Chinese medicine and gender studies in China. Wu identifies her aim in the book very clearly at the outset: ‘This book examines how … medical thinkers of late imperial China approached a set of universal concerns … promoting fertility, sustaining pregnancy, ensuring the safe delivery of healthy babies, and facilitating women's postpartum recovery … my aim is to understand how people during this time “framed” women's reproductive bodies’ (p. 3). Throughout the book, Wu examines all these areas in great detail, giving a pluralistic view of the many, and sometimes conflicting, views of women's medicine, or fuke, in the late imperial period. Wu also connects these views to earlier ideas of fuke and women's bodies, and explains how the transition from earlier to later beliefs and practices was informed by intellectual shifts, competing epistemologies and practical concerns.