898 Book Reviews

that the author has selected. For instance, in the most interesting second chapter, titled
‘Tools, Tinctures and Texts: Fashioning and Marketing the “Doctress” of Empire’, the
author provides an engaging discussion on the contents of the medical chests that ‘circu-
lated’ in the empire; from the enema machine of Lucie Duff Gordon to the eclectic pill box
of Isabel Burton. What it lacks is a thick description and an analysis of the contents of the
toolbox and how the medical market in Europe responded to the demands of amateur
practitioners.
For the rest, the author argues, like several historians, that medicine was a ‘tool of
empire’ used to distinguish the civilized from the savage natives. Hassan also argues
that British women ‘penetrated’ the veil, or the zenana, more closely and easily than
male doctors, and that they, both in their early amateurish and later professional roles,

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went to India through the Dufferin Fund and used the very fact of their femininity to
establish themselves as professionals by entering and ‘sanitising’ the harems when their
medical abilities were being questioned in Victorian England. Finally, the author describes
the acceptance of western ideals of professionalism and feminism by the first western
educated Indian women doctors in India. A surprising omission here is that the author
has not included any narratives by women medical missionaries, who played an important
role in disseminating therapeutics; I believe that they fell between the categories of
amateur and professional medical women and their perspectives would have provided
knowledge of how western medical therapeutics were gradually introduced to rural
and remote areas in non-western communities.
Overall, the book brings together several travel narratives by British women who trav-
elled to non-western countries as part of an entourage or later, professionally, on their
own and who practised medicine using western therapeutics and tools on non-western
communities. Although it provides little original insight into either medical or literary
history, this book will be a useful reference for those interested in nineteenth-century
medical travel literature.
doi:10.1093/shm/hks065 Nandini Bhattacharya
Advance Access published 30 August 2012 University of Leicester
nb177@le.ac.uk

Yi-Li Wu, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor, and Childbirth in Late

Imperial China, Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press,
2010. Pp. xiii + 362. $55.00/£37.65. ISBN 978 0 520 26068 9.
Yi Li-Wu’s book, Reproducing Women: Medicine, Metaphor and Childbirth in Late Impe-
rial China, is an excellent addition to the growing fields of Chinese medicine and gender
studies in China. Wu identifies her aim in the book very clearly at the outset: ‘This book
examines how … medical thinkers of late imperial China approached a set of universal
concerns … promoting fertility, sustaining pregnancy, ensuring the safe delivery of
healthy babies, and facilitating women’s postpartum recovery … my aim is to understand
how people during this time “framed” women’s reproductive bodies’ (p. 3). Throughout
the book, Wu examines all these areas in great detail, giving a pluralistic view of the many,
and sometimes conflicting, views of women’s medicine, or fuke, in the late imperial
period. Wu also connects these views to earlier ideas of fuke and women’s bodies, and
explains how the transition from earlier to later beliefs and practices was informed by
intellectual shifts, competing epistemologies and practical concerns.
In the first chapter, Wu gives a concise history of late imperial women’s medicine. It was
a male endeavour, like all other intellectual pursuits, and ‘medicine for women was
 Book Reviews 899

integrated into the masculine outer sphere of public service and moral stewardship’
(p. 17). This gave men the authority to interpret female bodies and influence their repro-
ductive health, and gave rise to a copious male-authored written corpus, produced by
either ‘hereditary physicians’ or ‘scholar-physicians’. Wu describes both camps in detail,
and the tensions that arose between them. The first chapter also describes the shift in
medical literature towards what Wu calls the ‘de-exotification of female difference’,
towards treating what Wu calls a ‘universal body, where male and female were but situa-
tional variants of a master pattern’ (p. 51).
The second chapter addresses the dissemination of medical knowledge in the late
imperial period by medical amateurs, who printed medical texts to benefit the world,
accrue religious merit, correct previous ‘erroneous’ information, and reach a wider audi-

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ence that they could then treat. Professional physicians were weary of medical amateurs
because they did not trust their expertise and because they undermined their position as
the sole possessors of medical knowledge.
Chapter 3 shifts the attention from the world of physicians to the function and structure
of the female body. Wu focuses specifically on the ‘womb’. Whereas ‘blood’ and its role
and function in the female body had been studied at length by historians of Chinese med-
icine, the womb had thus far been largely overlooked. Wu describes the womb as a
passage of energies and fluids, a container, and a crucible where energies come together
and transform: by focusing on this organ Wu challenges one of the long-held assumptions
about Chinese medicine, that of ‘function, not structure’. This explanation ‘has assumed
that the physical morphology of the body was unimportant to the development of
Chinese medical thought’ (p. 117). Wu asserts that ‘we need to take seriously the numer-
ous descriptions of bodily morphology that appear in Chinese texts’ (p. 117).
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are devoted to an in depth look at pregnancy and miscarriage,
childbirth, and post-partum. Wu discusses these events, and illnesses related to them,
in detail and from a variety of perspectives, while giving the reader a sense of the com-
peting narratives and treatments available to women in the late imperial medical world.
Wu explains clearly and effectively the complex workings of the female body in each
one of these situations and clarifies their interconnectedness. For example, her discussion
of the ways in which doctors looked at miscarriage, premature birth and death of the
foetus as points on a continuum rather than as separate events, and the physicians’ atten-
tion to both mother and child at all times, reveals the complexity of late imperial under-
standings of the female body as well as the multiplicity of treatments born out of these
understandings.
The epilogue is compelling in its ability to bring together the main points argued so
convincingly in the book. Here, Wu goes on to challenge past scholarship on women’s
medicine and medical understandings of the body. She questions the long held idea
that, starting in the Song dynasty, there emerged two views of gender in medical
treatises, one that viewed male and female bodies as homologous and androgynous,
and one that saw the female body as drastically different from the male, mainly
because of the overwhelming influence of blood in its functions. Wu wants to
move away from this dichotomy, and proposes ‘an alternate way of conceptualizing
the relationship between androgyny and gender difference in Chinese medical
thought, one that … saw the human body as simultaneously sexless and sexed. …
Chinese medical doctrine saw androgyny and gender difference as two sides of a dif-
ferent coin’ (p. 231). This new conceptualisation needs to be taken into account seri-
ously, and it will be a useful tool for looking at gender in medical theory and practice
in the late Imperial period.
900 Book Reviews

Wu’s book and her arguments are compelling, well researched and bold, and she is not
afraid to challenge long held assumptions on the basis of her careful, thorough and wide
ranging reading of the Chinese medical tradition.
doi:10.1093/shm/hks064 Elena Valussi
Advance Access published 30 August 2012 Loyola University of Chicago
evalussi@luc.edu

Marta E. Hanson, Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine: Disease and the

Geographic Imagination in Late Imperial China, London; New York: Routledge,
2011. Pp. xi-265. £ 85. ISBN 978 0 415 60253 2.

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The seventh volume in Routledge’s Needham Research Institute Series, Marta Hanson’s
Speaking of Epidemics in Chinese Medicine is a groundbreaking work on the history of
Chinese epidemiology. Analysing central as well as peripheral medical texts, the book
draws a captivating biography of ‘Warm Diseases’ (wenbing) spanning two thousand
years of Chinese history. Rather than seeking to identify Chinese medical taxonomies in
biomedical terms, Hanson takes her material ethnographically seriously. In this, the
anthropological value of her book is immense, for instead of imposing a microbiological
straightjacket to native medical categories it seeks to understand what she calls the ‘his-
torical and culturally shaped individual experience of disease as well as contemporary
medical responses to it’ (p. 7). Yet, rather than simply being a rich description of a long
neglected aspect of Chinese medicine, Hanson’s book engages in a powerful analysis
of the material at hand. By bringing to the fore problems of spatiality in Chinese
medical thought, the author underlines the vitality of notions of wenbing to the social
life of the Chinese imperial state. Hanson thus navigates the reader through shifts and
continuities in the ‘geographic imagination’ of epidemics by means of what she terms
‘biographies of disease concepts’.
The first part of the book introduces foundational notions of Chinese cosmological
imagination (such as the ‘five directions’ and the ‘northwest versus southeast dichotomy’),
relating them to medical theory and practice. By examining the ‘deep history’ of such
notions in the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Cannon and consequent canonical texts of
Chinese medicine, Hanson unravels a medical cosmology dominated by the concern
over the directionality of disease. Linking imperial geography with the human body,
this concern is analysed as pertinent to Chinese imperial governmentality until the
Mongol invasion.
The second part of the book opens by examining what Hanson terms ‘the southern
shift’ during the Ming dynasty. Based on a focus on north–south asymmetry, medical
geography related to wenbing in a way that reflected the problems and scopes of the
re-unified Chinese Empire. Importantly, Hanson illustrates that the degree of regional
determinism, as well as the significance of the imagined dichotomy in the constitution
of southern and northern human bodies, were in fact issues more open to discussion
than we have hitherto been allowed to believe. In the chapter dedicated to ‘Ming
medical frontiers’ Hanson examines further how notions of miasmas (zhang) in the Far
South of the empire ushered in a new ‘contagious-consciousness’ in Chinese medicine,
albeit with strong ethnic bias. The examination of the late Ming period forms a vital
bridge in Hanson’s argument on the importance of ‘geographical imagination’ of epidem-
ics. By demonstrating how the shifting conceptualisation of wenbing in the early seven-
teenth century was intertwined with a discourse on anomaly, the book underlines how
epidemiological crises were seen as resulting from governmental failure, ushering in an