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HIST2140
Health, Medicine and Society in Late Imperial and Modern China
Professor Angela Ki Che Leung (angela-leung@hku.hk)
Spring 2013
Classroom: CPD 4.17
Time: 1:30-3:20PM
Course description:
This seminar course explores the history of the body, health and diseases in late
Imperial and modern China, in comparison with the West. We will stress the
relevance of such changes in China’s general historical context. The course is in two
parts: it will begin with discussions on the history of the body and continue to
explore the changing imagination of the reproductive body. The second part of the
course is on changing concepts of diseases in China from the traditional to the
modern periods. The course will conclude with a general discussion on the meaning
of “hygienic modernity” for China: in what ways are changing conceptions of the
body and of diseases constitutive of China’s “modernity”?
Required reading: (*: on library reserve list)
1. Andrews, Bridie, “Tuberculosis anad the Assimilation of Germ Theory in China,
1895-1937” Journal for the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences. 52.1 (1997),
pp. 114-157.
2. Benedict, Carol, Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-century China. Stanford University
Press, 1996.*
3. Bray, Francesca, “A deadly disorder: understanding women’s health in late
Imperial China”, in Don. Bates ed., Knowledge and the Scholarly Medical
Traditions, 1995, pp. 235-250.*
4. Furth, Charlotte, A Flourishing Yin. Gender in China’s Medical History, 960-1665.
University of California Press, 1996.*
5. Kuriyama, Shigehisa, “Concepts of Disease in East Asia” in K. Kiple, The
Cambridge World History of Human Disease. Cambridge University Press, 1993,
pp. 52-59
6. Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex : Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud.
Harvard University Press, 1990. *
7. Lei, Sean H.l., “Habituating Individuality: Framing Tuberculosis and Its Material
Solutions in Republican China” Bulletin for the History of Medicine 84 (2010), pp.
248-279.
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8. Leung, Angela KC, Leprosy in China: A History. Columbia University Press 2009.*
9. Porter, Roy “History of the Body” in Peter Burke New Perspectives on Historical
Writing, Polity Press 1991, pp. 206-232.*
10. Rosenberg, Charles, “Framing disease: Illness, Society, and History”, in C.
Rosenberg and J. Golden eds., Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History.
Rutgers University Press 1997, “Introduction”.*
11. Topley, Marjorie, “Chinese Traditional Ideas and the Treatment of Disease: Two
Examples from Hong Kong”, in Man, v.5 no.3, 1970, pp.421-437.
Course requirements:
The class meets once a week for lectures, seminars and discussions. Student should
attend all classes, complete required reading and actively participate in discussions.
Grading will be based on participation and oral presentation (30%), a short (of 4-6
pages double-spaced) reading report (20%) and a longer (10-12 pages double-spaced)
term paper (50%). The term paper is on a topic of the student’s choice after
consulting with the instructor. The topic should be decided on or before April 11.
Reading reports and term papers should be submitted on or before May 22. Late
submissions will not be graded.
Course schedule:
January 24 Introduction: body, disease, health and medicine in Chinese history
January 31 History of the body
Read
1. Roy Porter, 1991.
2. Shigehisa Kuriyama “The Imagination of Winds and the Development of the
Chinese Conception of the Body”, in A. Zito and T. Barlow, Body, Subject and Power in
China. University of Chicago Press, pp. 23-41)
3. Read: Kuriyama, Shigehisa, The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of
Greek and Chinese Medicine. Zone Book, 1999.
February 7
History of the reproductive body, read Laqueur, chapters 1-3
February 21
History of the reproductive body, read Laqueur, chapters 4-6
February 28
History of the reproductive body, read Furth, chapters 1-4
March 7 History of the reproductive body, read Furth, chapters 5-8.
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March 21 Changing concepts of disease: Introduction
Read:
1. McNeill, William, Plagues and Peoples. Blackwell, 1976.
2. Sontag, Susan, Illness as Metaphor. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983.
March 28 Framing disease in the West.
Read
1. Rosenberg 1997;
2. C. Rosenberg, “Banishing Risk: Continuity and Change in the Moral Management
of Disease”, in A. Brandt and P. Rozin, Morality and Health. Routledge 1997, pp.
35-51.
April 11
Concepts of disease: China
Read
1. Kuriyama 1993;
2. Topley, 1970;
3. Bray, 1995.
4. Andrews, 1997
5. Lei, S. 2010
April 18
Film on leprosy in Burma; Read Leung 2009, chapter 3
April 25 Plague and Hygienic Modernity:
Read:
1. Benedict, Carol, Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-century China. Stanford University
Press, 1996. Chapter 5-6 (pp.131-164)
2. Sean Lei, “Sovereignty and Microscope: Constituting notifiable infectious disease
and containing the Manchurian Plague (1910-1911)”, in A Leung and C Furth eds,
Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia. Duke University Press 2010, pp.73-108.
Film on Manchurian plague
May 2
Read
Rogaski, Ruth, Hygienic Modernity. Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port
China. University of California Press 2004. Chapter 3 and Conclusion.*
Supplementary reading (for the writing of term paper)
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1. Anderson, Warwick, Colonial Pathologies. American Tropical Medicine. Race, and
2.
3.
4.
5.
Hygiene in the Philipinnes. Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2007.
Bray, Francesca, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China.
University of California Press 1997.*
Damasio, Antonio, and Hanna Damasio. "Minding the Body." Deadalus: Journal of
the American Academy for Arts and Sciences 135, no. 3 (2006): 15-22.
Greene, Jeremy, Prescribing by Numbers. Drugs and the Definition of Disease.
John Hopkins University Press, 2007.
Hsu, Elizabeth, “Pulse Diagnostics in the Western Han: How Mai (脈) and Qi (氣)
Determine Bing (病)”, in Hsu ed.,Innovation in Chinese Medicine (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 2001), pp. 51-91.
6. Kleinman, Arthur, Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Beurathenia,
and Pain in Modern China. Yale University Press 1990.
7. Strickmann, Michel, Chinese Magical Medicine. Stanford University Press 2002.
8. Volker Scheid, Chinese Medicine in Contemporary China: Plurality and Synthesis.
Duke University Press 2002.*
9. Sivin, Nathan, “State, Cosmos, and Body in the Last Three Centuries BC”, Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies. 55.1 (1995): 5-37
10. -----------------, Traditional Medicine in Contemporary China. University of Michigan
Press 1987.
11. 梁其姿『面對疾病』北京: 人民大學出版社 2012*
12. 李建民主編 『從醫療看中國史』台北聯經 2008
13. 李貞德主編 『性別､身體與醫療』台北聯經 2008
14. 林富士主編 『疾病的歷史』台北聯經 2011