This timely and diverse volume brings together exemplary scholarship on the history of colonial medicine and public health in China and Taiwan from the late nineteenth century to the present. As Charlotte Furth states in her introduction, each case study in the book is “shaped by local social and technical systems, political resources, and available scientific understandings” and “takes its place in a critical historical genealogy of modern public health movements which deployed a variety of state and international levers of power” (pp. 6–7).
Angela Leung's contribution meticulously disentangles the layers of meanings of chuanran—literally “transmission by dyeing or staining.” This tenth-century term became in the twentieth “the standard translation for the biomedical notion of ‘contagion’ as ‘the communication of disease from one person to another by bodily contact’” (p. 26). Leung argues that the term “facilitated and at the same time distorted” the introduction of germ theory in China (p. 46). Yu Xinzhong explains that the hygiene of Jiangnan cities in imperial China depended upon the network of contractors and laborers who collected and sold human excrement to farmers as fertilizer. When Shanghai became a treaty port in 1852, the new municipal council adapted this system, turning night-soil workers into sanitation employees. This hybrid system “satisfied both traditional agricultural needs and Western urban environmental norms, including especially the elimination of bad smells and disorder from the streets” (pp. 67–8). It also explained why Shanghai was slow to install sewage plants and flush toilets. Sean Lei's rich analysis of the 1911 Manchurian plague shows, among many other insights, that the epistemic rupture in medical discourse in China lay in the construction of a new disease category (chuanranbing, “infectious disease”): “an acute and widespread epidemic that was transmitted by direct and intimate human interaction” (p. 89). Precisely because neither Western nor Chinese medicine could offer any effective cure, “Western medicine could demonstrate its relative, non-therapeutic strength in diagnosing and containing the plague and defending China's sovereignty” (p. 88).
Shang-Jen Li examines nineteenth-century views on diet and health in China, showing that “British medical practitioners relied heavily on the conceptual framework and theoretical resources provided by tropical hygiene, especially the work of their colleagues in India,” and that their attitudes towards food in India and China were connected with “the different nature of the British imperial presence in these two countries” (p. 127). Ruth Rogaski's brilliant chapter “explores the multiple meanings that some Chinese and Japanese attributed to biomedicine and public health activities in Manchuria during the first half of the twentieth century” (p. 132) and the “problems of representation and truth, history and justice” (p. 143) in examining the legacy of the notorious Military Medical Unit 731, where Japanese scientists conducted lethal experiments on human subjects. Rogaski argues that the history of biomedicine and public health is simultaneously a history of “health and violence, cleanliness and coercion, religious benevolence and scientific objectification” (p. 156). Wu Chia-Ling uses oral histories to challenge the colonial stereotype of birthing women and their lay birth attendants in Taiwan as “backward, irrational, and insufficiently educated” (p. 175). Wu argues that some women used modern midwifery “because trained midwives had become part of their networks” (p. 176), not because they valued scientific childbirth and devalued lay obstetrical practices.
Lin Yi-ping and Liu Shiyung revisit the public health campaigns against malaria in Taiwan, particularly Japanese efforts in the early twentieth century, and the war against mosquitoes in the 1950s and 1960s sponsored by America and the World Health Organization that involved island-wide DDT sprayings. They show the Taiwanese case as a local manifestation of global health policy projects. Li Yushang studies early attempts to eliminate schistosomiasis in the lower Yangzi delta (1948–58), while Marta Hanson illustrates the “conceptual blind spots” that prevented Western journalists and analysts from “seeing the fuller, more compelling story of the interactions between biomedical and traditional Chinese medical institutions, researchers, and practitioners” (p. 235) during the SARS outbreak in 2003. Tseng Yen-fen and Wu Chia-Ling reveal the “decision-making processes of health authorities responding to new health risks and uncertainties” (p. 255), using the Taiwanese response to SARS as their case study.
By the editors’ own admission, there is insufficient coverage of central, southwest, and northwest China in this volume. And throughout the book, there are many fascinating but truncated theoretical remarks—for instance Furth's comment on the usefulness of Foucauldean notions of governmentality and biopolitics (p. 17) and Warwick Anderson's invocation of Agamben's “state of exception” (p. 276) in the short but excellent afterword. There are also inviting comparisons with conceptual frameworks from South Asian and African studies. All of these are begging to be developed to complete the “global genealogies of scientific practices in interaction with highly local situations” (p. 2). Overall, this invaluable volume commands not only the attention of East Asianists, but all scholars interested in the global circulations of scientific knowledge, medical technologies, and practices of governance.
