Neither Donkey nor Horse: Medicine in the Struggle over China's Modernity
Sean Hsiang-lin Lei
Abstract
This book aims to answer one question: How was Chinese medicine transformed from an antithesis of modernity in the early twentieth century into a potent symbol for China’s exploration of its own modernity half a century later? Instead of viewing this transition as a derivative of the political history of modern China, it argues that China's medical history had a life of its own and at times even influenced the ideological struggle over the definition of China’s modernity and the Chinese state. Far from being a “remnant” of pre-modern China, Chinese medicine in the twentieth century co-evolved ... More
This book aims to answer one question: How was Chinese medicine transformed from an antithesis of modernity in the early twentieth century into a potent symbol for China’s exploration of its own modernity half a century later? Instead of viewing this transition as a derivative of the political history of modern China, it argues that China's medical history had a life of its own and at times even influenced the ideological struggle over the definition of China’s modernity and the Chinese state. Far from being a “remnant” of pre-modern China, Chinese medicine in the twentieth century co-evolved with Western medicine and the Nationalist state, undergoing a profound transformation—institutionally, epistemologically, and materially—that resulted in the creation of a modern Chinese medicine. Nevertheless, this newly re-assembled modern Chinese medicine was stigmatized by its opponents at that time as a mongrel form of medicine that was “neither donkey nor horse,” because the discourse of modernity rejected the possibility of productive crossbreeding between the modern and the traditional. Against the hegemony of this discourse, the definitive feature of this new medicine was the fact that it took the discourse of modernity (and the accompanying knowledge of biomedicine) seriously but survived the resulting epistemic violence by way of negotiation and self-innovation. In this sense, the historic rise of this “neither donkey nor horse” medicine constitutes a local innovation of crucial importance for the notion of China’s modernity, challenging us to imagine different kinds of relationships between science and non-Western knowledge traditions.
Keywords:
Modern Chinese medicine,
China’s modernity,
mongrel medicine,
history of medicine,
China,
hybridity,
neither donkey nor horse
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226169880 |
Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: May 2015 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226169910.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, author
Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
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