Main description:

In 1968, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese Communist Party endorsed a radical new system of health-care delivery for the rural masses. Soon every village had at least one barefoot doctor to provide basic medical care, creating a national network of health-care services for the very first time. The barefoot doctors were portrayed nationally and internationally as revolutionary heroes, wading undaunted through rice paddies to bring effective, low-cost care to poor peasants.
This book is the first comprehensive study to look beyond the nostalgia dominating present scholarship on public health in China and offer a powerful and carefully contextualized critique of the prevailing views on the role of barefoot doctors, their legacy, and their impact. Drawing on primary documents from the Cultural Revolution and personal interviews with patients and doctors, Xiaoping Fang examines the evidence within the broader history of medicine in revolutionary and postreform China. He finds that rather than consolidating traditional Chinese medicine, as purported by government propaganda, the barefoot doctor program introduced modern Western medicine to rural China, effectively modernizing established methods and forms of care. As a result, this volume retrieves from potential oblivion a critical part of the history of Western medicine in China.

Xiaoping Fang is assistant professor of Chinese history at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Contents:

Introduction
Village Healers, Medical Pluralism, and State Medicine
Revolutionizing Knowledge Transmission Structures
Pharmaceuticals Reach the Villages
Healing Styles and Medical Beliefs: The Consumption of Chinese and Western Medicines
Relocating Illness: The Shift from Home Bedside to Hospital Ward
Group Identity, Power Relationships, and Medical Legitimacy
Conclusion
Appendixes
The Organization of the Three-Tiered Medical System in Rural China, 1968-83
Common Medicines in Chinese Villages during the 1960s-70s