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

Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late Imperial China
ISBN-10
0520947614
ISBN-13
9780520947610
Category
History
Pages
378
Language
English
Published
2010-08-11
Publisher
Univ of California Press
Author
Yi-Li Wu

Description

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.

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