Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China - Hardcover

Yi-Li Wu

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520260686 ISBN 13: 9780520260689

Publisher: University of California Press, 2010

Synopsis

This innovative book uses the lens of cultural history to examine the development of medicine in Qing dynasty China. Focusing on the specialty of “medicine for women”(fuke), Yi-Li Wu explores the material and ideological issues associated with childbearing in the late imperial period. She draws on a rich array of medical writings that circulated in seventeenth- to nineteenth-century China to analyze the points of convergence and contention that shaped people's views of women's reproductive diseases. These points of contention touched on fundamental issues: How different were women's bodies from men's? What drugs were best for promoting conception and preventing miscarriage? Was childbirth inherently dangerous? And who was best qualified to judge? Wu shows that late imperial medicine approached these questions with a new, positive perspective.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"This is a tremendously rich, exhaustively researched work. Reproducing Women is a pioneering study that will undoubtedly become a standard reading on women's medicine in Chinese history."―Ruth Rogaski, author of Hygienic Modernity

About the Author:

Yi-Li Wu is a Research Fellow of the EASTmedicine Research Centre of the University of Westminster and a Center Associate of the Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0520260686
• ISBN 13: 9780520260689
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 378