Medicine for Women in Imperial China

Medicine for Women in Imperial China

Author: Angela Ki Che Leung

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2006-06-01

Total Pages: 219

ISBN-13: 9047409922

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This book is the first scholarly work in English on medicine for women in pre-Song China. The essays deal with key issues in early Chinese gynecology and obstetrics, and how they were formulated before the Song when medicine for women reached maturity. The reader will find that medical questions in early China also reflected religious and social issues. The authors, based in North America and East Asia, describe and analyze women’s bodies, illnesses, and childbirth experiences according to a variety of archaeological materials and historical texts. The essays reveal a rich and complex picture of early views on the female medical and social body that have wide implications for other institutions of the period, and on medicine and women in the later imperial era.


Reproducing Women

Reproducing Women

Author: Yi-Li Wu

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2010-08-11

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 0520947614

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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.


A Flourishing Yin

A Flourishing Yin

Author: Charlotte Furth

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1999-03-05

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 0520208293

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Content Description #"A Philip E. Lilienthal book."#Includes bibliographical references and index.


Chinese Women in the Imperial Past

Chinese Women in the Imperial Past

Author: Harriet Zurndorfer

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2022-08-22

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9004490167

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The present volume is the result of a Leiden University workshop on women in imperial China by a group of international scholars. In recent years Chinese women and gender studies have attracted more and more attention, and this book is one of the first efforts to focus on major aspects of this subject. It covers a wide range of topics and disciplines, including bibliography, demography, history, legal studies, literature, history of medicine, and philosophy. Chinese Women in the Imperial Past can rightly be seen as connected with the new Brill journal NAN NÜ, Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China, which was founded to provide the scholarly community with a lasting forum in which the subject of Chinese women and gender can be dealt with in its own right.


Women in Early Imperial China

Women in Early Imperial China

Author: Bret Hinsch

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2010-08-16

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 0742568245

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After a long spell of chaos, the Qin and Han dynasties (221 BCE–220 CE) saw the unification of the Chinese Empire under a single ruler, government, and code of law. During this era, changing social and political institutions affected the ways people conceived of womanhood. New ideals were promulgated, and women's lives gradually altered to conform to them. And under the new political system, the rulers' consorts and their families obtained powerful roles that allowed women unprecedented influence in the highest level of government. Recognized as the leading work in the field, this introductory survey offers the first sustained history of women in the early imperial era. Now in a revised edition that incorporates the latest scholarship and theoretical approaches, the book draws on extensive primary and secondary sources in Chinese and Japanese to paint a remarkably detailed picture of the distant past. Bret Hinsch's introductory chapters orient the nonspecialist to early imperial Chinese society; subsequent chapters discuss women's roles from the multiple perspectives of kinship, wealth and work, law, government, learning, ritual, and cosmology. An enhanced array of line drawings, a Chinese-character glossary, and extensive notes and bibliography enhance the author's discussion. Historians and students of gender and early China alike will find this book an invaluable overview.


Ancient Healing for Modern Women

Ancient Healing for Modern Women

Author: Xiaolan Zhao

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2009-05-26

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 0802718698

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One of Canada's most trusted and beloved health practitioners introduces American women to the wisdom of traditional Chinese medicine and the time-tested practices that have helped optimize physical and emotional health for centuries. Since establishing her practice in Canada twelve years ago, Dr. Xiaolan Zhao has treated thousands of women suffering from fatigue, PMS, infertility, depression, cancer, menopausal symptoms and other gynecological disorders - health problems that are all too common in the West but less so in China, where traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) has been an integral part of women's lives for thousands of years. As a physician originally trained in Western medicine who later took up the practice of TCM, Dr. Zhao has seen how effective the Chinese approach is for her patients, and her book will help American women incorporate its wisdom and practices in our lives. Sharing stories from her own life and the lives of her patients, Dr. Zhao shows that we have nothing to reject about our feminine selves, and explains how we can develop new relationships with our bodies and our emotions. There is so much every woman can do in terms of ongoing and preventative self-care to improve her health and vitality and prevent illness. By making simple changes in diet, exercise routine, sex life and the way we deal with stress and our emotions, we can profoundly improve our health now and into the future.


Medical Ethics in Imperial China

Medical Ethics in Imperial China

Author: Paul Ulrich Unschuld

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1979

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 9780520035430

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The ethics of Chinese physicians were formulated during the Confucian era and advocated the interests of the general public. Medical resources in China were distributed to shamans (up to this century), Buddhist monks, Taoist hermits, Confucian scholars, itinerant and established physicians, laymen, midwives, and many others. Conflict over distribution of those resources affected everyone. Independently practicing physicians acquired more and more control. Ethical debates were used to centralize resources among physicians. Prognosis has become increasingly significant as a means of protection and reputation. A formulated ethics from the elite group of physicians must not only subject itself to the values dominating society but create values in the advanced medical regions; e.g., allocation of resources to preserve life.


A Flourishing Yin

A Flourishing Yin

Author: Charlotte Furth

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1999-03-05

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9780520918870

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This book brings the study of gender to Chinese medicine and in so doing contextualizes Chinese medicine in history. It examines the rich but neglected tradition of fuke, or medicine for women, over the seven hundred years between the Song and the end of the Ming dynasty. Using medical classics, popular handbooks, case histories, and belles lettres, it explores evolving understandings of fertility and menstruation, gestation and childbirth, sexuality, and gynecological disorders. Furth locates medical practice in the home, where knowledge was not the monopoly of the learned physician and male doctors had to negotiate the class and gender boundaries of everyday life. Women as healers and as patients both participated in the dominant medical culture and sheltered a female sphere of expertise centered on, but not limited to, gestation and birth. Ultimately, her analysis of the relationship of language, text, and practice reaches beyond her immediate subject to address theoretical problems that arise when we look at the epistemological foundations of our knowledge of the body and its history.


Medicine and Society in Late Imperial China

Medicine and Society in Late Imperial China

Author: Yüan-ling Chao

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 9781433103810

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Medicine and Society in Late Imperial China explores the vibrant medical landscape in late imperial China (1600-1850), focusing on one of the most cultured and elegant cities in the lower Yangzi region, Suzhou. The central theme of the book is that the economic prosperity and intellectual vibrancy of late imperial Jiangnan fostered the emergence of a community of physicians who engaged in lively debates concerning qualifications and practice, leading to a growing sense of identity and new ways of theorizing and practicing medicine. It shows that the classical medical tradition interacted in a fluid relationship with both the state and the folk traditions. Medicine and Society in Late Imperial China is divided into two parts. Part I provides a broad framework on the discourse on the ideal physician, as well as examining the sanhuang miao (Temple of the Three Emperors) and challenges to existing medical theories by the wenbing (warm factor) school. Part II focuses on Suzhou physicians and their writings within the broad medical tradition, illustrates a local perspective of medicine's relationship with the state through an examination of the outbreak of epidemics in Suzhou, and discusses the development of the fields of specialties in medicine.