Extract

Meticulously researched and conceptually ambitious, Wayne Soon’s Global Medicine in China: A Diasporic History expands a growing historical revisionism that centers the Chinese diaspora as a proactive agent in transforming China’s modern history. A notable book with which Soon’s study dialogues is Shelly Chan’s Diaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration (2018). Soon illustrates a historical process akin to the one documented by Chan, but Soon’s narrative is nuanced by a distinct viewpoint from the history of military medicine. The book argues that a military medical complex emerged in the 1930s and 1940s, comprising wartime curative and preventive medicine, China’s first blood bank, and military medical education. The architect behind this complex was the Singapore-born physician, Robert Lim, who played an instrumental role in the dissemination, implementation, and modernization of biomedicine in China and Taiwan. The book unveils both the global origins and transpacific consequences of this military medical complex, which culminated in the relocation of the National Defense Medical Center (NDMC) to Taipei, where it has thrived since 1949.

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