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

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. 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. "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."--Publisher description "Medicine for women" and the literate medical tradition Amateur as arbiter : popular publishing and fuke manuals The palace of the child : function and structure in the female body An uncertain harvest : pregnancy and miscarriage "Born like a lamb" : the discourse of cosmologically resonant childbirth To generate and transform : strategies for postpartum health Epilogue: body, gender, and medical legitimacy. Examines the development of medicine in Qing dynasty China. Focusing on the specialty of 'medicine for women' (fuke), this book explores the material and ideological issues associated with childbearing in the late imperial period. It analyzes the points of convergence and contention that shaped people's views of women's reproductive diseases.