The art of medicine: Maoist public-health campaigns, Chinese medicine, and SARS

Abstract

Developed out of mid-19th-century mass media campaigns to sell products, announce performances, and propagandise in western and central Europe, they were intended to promote healthy behaviours among individuals and so strengthen the body politic. Yet the unknown story of the SARS epidemic outside mainland China is the part Chinese medicine played: psychologically, for those in the public who purchased Chinese medicine as SARS preventatives; politically, for those in and outside the government who promoted Chinese medicine in the fight against SARS; and clinically, in the hospitals where physicians treated over 50% of SARS patients with integrated medicine.