Main description:

This collection expands the history of Chinese medicine by bridging the philosophical concerns of epistemology and the history and cultural politics of transregional medical formations. Topics range from the spread of gingko's popularity from East Asia to the West to the appeal of acupuncture for complementing in-vitro fertilisation regimens, from the modernisation of Chinese anatomy and forensic science to the evolving perceptions of the clinical efficacy of Chinese medicine. The individual essays cohere around the powerful theoretical-methodological approach, 'historical epistemology', which challenges the seemingly constant and timeless status of such rudimentary but pivotal dimensions of scientific process as knowledge, reason, argument, objectivity, evidence, fact, and truth. In studying the globalising role of medical objects, the contested premise of medical authority and legitimacy, and the syncretic transformations of metaphysical and ontological knowledge, contributors illuminate how the breadth of the historical study of Chinese medicine and its practices of knowledge-making in the modern period must be at once philosophical and transnational in scope. -- .

Contents:

Introduction
1. "Historical epistemology and the making of modern Chinese medicine" Howard Chiang
Part I. Objects
2. Kuang-chi Hung, "Within the Lungs, the Stomach, and the Mind: Convergences and Divergences in the Medical and Natural Histories of Ginkgo biloba" [4 illustrations]
3. Yi-Li Wu, "Bodily Knowledge and Western Learning in Late Imperial China: The Case of Wang Shixiong (1808-68)" [1 illustration]
4. Bridie Andrews, "Blood in the History of Modern Chinese Medicine" [5 illustrations]
Part II. Authority
5. Daniel Asen, "The Only Options? 'Experience' and 'Theory' in Debates Over Forensic Knowledge and Expertise in Early Twentieth-Century China"
6. David Luesink, "State Power, Governmentality, and the (Mis)Remembrance of Chinese Medicine"
7. Eric Karchmer, "Slow Medicine: How Chinese Medicine Became Efficacious Only for Chronic Conditions"
Part III. Existence
8. Judith Farquhar, "Metaphysics at the Bedside"
9. Leon Antonio Rocha, "How to Make 'Acubabies'"
Index -- .