Content area
Full text
THE MAKING OF MODERN CHINESE MEDICINE, 1850-1960. Contemporary Chinese Studies. By Bridie Andrews. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014. xvi, 294 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$35.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-7748-2433-0.
Chinese medicine may not be what you think it is. Americans may be forgiven for thinking acupuncture the most important part of China's medical culture, yet in 1820 a popular slogan in China stated that acupuncture was "absolutely inappropriate to all gentlemen." How then did needling become the representative practice for Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM)? What happened, Bridie Andrews reveals, is that Chinese medicine became modern even as the conspicuous word "traditional" was added to its name.
In this long-awaited synthetic study examining the transformation of Chinese medical culture from a pluralistic and private affair in the mid-nineteenth century to a standardized and state-sponsored dual system by the mid-twentieth, Andrews offers the best account to date of how "Western" medicine (xiyi) and "Chinese" medicine (zhongyi) encountered each other and both became modern. The genius of this study is that it keeps its eye fully on both forms of medicine, rather than one or the other. In nine lean chapters, Andrews examines the transformation of the medical field in China that ranged from herbalists, shamans, bone-setters, midwives, priests and a few medical missionaries, to one in which two forms of medicine competed. There was an increasingly power-hungry xiyi that sought to dominate the medical field, and an increasingly rationalized Chinese medicine that (re-) incorporated acupuncture from Japan. Like other recent works on Chinese medicine, Andrews skewers the nationalist...