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

Online ISBN:
9780520947610
Print ISBN:
9780520260689
Publisher:
University of California Press
Book

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

Published online:
22 March 2012
Published in print:
8 November 2010
Online ISBN:
9780520947610
Print ISBN:
9780520260689
Publisher:
University of California Press

Abstract

This 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), the book explores the material and ideological issues associated with childbearing in the late imperial period. It draws on an 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? The book shows that late imperial medicine approached these questions with a new, positive perspective.

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