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The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960

Bridie Andrews’s new book The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1850–1960 aims to bring Western readers a new account of the history of modern “Chinese” medicine. Her analysis is grounded on the contemporary intellectual view that the idea of a universal and normative modernity is largely considered as an illusion of the mid-twentieth-century elite, who tended to believe that an ideal scientific “Western” medicine emerged against a nonscientific traditional “Chinese” medicine in modern China. It has been commonly thought that this modernist view of the midtwentieth-century elite was produced objectively by judging the clinical efficacy of modern scientific medicine. But according to Andrews, it was not. Rather, this book emphasizes that it was the political imperative to defend Chinese sovereignty in the face of superior Western economic, technological, and military power that drove Chinese intellectuals, doctors, and politicians to facilitate institutional medical reforms to embrace “Western” medicine, while simultaneously building a new “Chinese” medicine. Andrews’s book broadly covers key events in the medicine arena in China from the late Qing Dynasty to early People’s Republic of China, chronologically, including nineteenth-centurymissionarymedicine (chap. 3), medical reforms in Japan (chap. 4), the Manchurian plague (chap. 5), and the separate trajectories of the institutionalization of “Western” and “Chinese” medicines during the Nationalist period (chap. 7). It draws particular attention to important agents involved in bringing about these changes: chapter 3 considers the nineteenth-century medical missionaries as an early example of practicing the “Western” medicine in commensurability with “Chinese” medicine and accommodation with cultural sensitivity of Chinese patients; chapter 6 examines the famous individuals who vigorously engaged in public debate, writing