Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century

This collection expands the history of colonial medicine and public health by exploring efforts to overcome disease and improve human health in Chinese regions of East Asia from the late nineteenth century to the present. The contributors consider the science and politics of public health policymaking and implementation in Taiwan, Manchuria, Hong Kong, and the Yangzi River delta, focusing mostly on towns and villages rather than cities. Whether discussing the resistance of lay midwives in colonial Taiwan to the Japanese campaign to replace them with experts in "scientific motherhood" or the reaction of British colonists in Shanghai to Chinese diet and health regimes, they illuminate the effects of foreign interventions and influences on particular situations and localities. They discuss responses to epidemics from the plague in early-twentieth-century Manchuria to SARS in southern China, Singapore, and Taiwan, but they also emphasize that public health is not just about epidemic crises. As essays on marsh drainage in Taiwan, the enforcement of sanitary ordinances in Shanghai, and vaccination drives in Manchuria show, throughout the twentieth century public health bureaucracies have primarily been engaged in the mundane activities of education, prevention, and monitoring.

"This collection of essays brings together in one volume cutting-edge scholarship on the history of hygiene and public health in East Asia. It will be welcomed not only by researchers on the history of medicine but also by those interested in topics as diverse as imperialism, demography, diet, and gender studies."---Carol Benedict, author of Bubonic Plague in Nineteenth-Century China

"This imaginatively conceived volume sets the agenda for an entirely new history of public health. Moving deftly between the local and the global, Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia demonstrates that public health is best understood as a series of relationships rather than as a closed project in nation- or empire-building. As the contributors to this fine book show, there was more than one `China' and certainly more than one `public health.'"---Mark Harrison, University of Oxford

Angela Ki Che Leung is Director of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Hong Kong, and Adjunct Research Fellow at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei. She is the author of Leprosy in China: A History. CHARLOTTE FURTH is Professor of History Emerita at the University of Southern California. She is the author of A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960-1665.