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

by Wu, Yi-Li

• ISBN13: 9780520260689
• ISBN10: 0520260686
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-08-11
• Publisher: Univ of California Pr

Summary

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, defining female and male illnesses as essentially alike and depicting childbirth as an inherently trouble-free process. In presenting this new view of the female body,Reproducing Womenrevises our understanding of Qing social relations of healing and attendant cultural assumptions about gender, the body, and nature.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Late Imperial Fuke and the Literate Medical Tradition	p. 15
Amateur as Arbiter: Popular Fuke Manuals in the Qing	p. 54
Function and Structure in the Female Body	p. 84
An Uncertain Harvest: Pregnancy and Miscarriage	p. 120
ôBorn Like a Lambö: The Discourse of Cosmologically Resonant Childbirth	p. 147
To Generate and Transform: Strategies for Postpartum Health	p. 188
Epilogue: Body, Gender, and Medical Legitimacy	p. 224
Notes	p. 237
Glossary	p. 311
Bibliography	p. 319
Index	p. 343
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