Session: Session 3, 3:30 – 5:00 pm, Friday 9/29
Category: Organized Panel
Location: Alma Mater
Chair: Kai-win Chow (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
Paper Presenters: Xinge Zhang, Xiaoyan Ren, Yating Li, Yuwei Jiang
Discussant: Wee-Siang Margaret Ng, College of Wooster
Abstract: This panel examines the interplay between institutions, groups, and individuals in knowledge-making in science and medicine, and the role that socio-economic, cultural, and political factors played in this process. Xinge Zhang’s paper examines the reading and performance of pharmaceutical dramas in nineteenth-century medical guilds. It argues that these plays served as an effective tool to promote student learning and assess the ability of pharmacy trainees. Yuwei Jiang’s study, focusing mainly on The Chinese Repository, a periodical published in Canton between 1832 and 1851, concentrates on how the writings by Western travelers and missionaries both perpetuated the deep-seated image of the Chinese opium eater as victims and helped to recover the underrepresented voice of opium users. Ren Xiaoyan’s paper looks at the understanding of wasting worms as the cause of fei lao, or tuberculosis, in the late imperial and Republican period. It argues that the established priority of the “configuration-functional” view over the “contamination-ontological” view helped Traditional Chinese Medicine to defend itself against germ theory in the twentieth century. Turning to contemporary China, Yating Li’s paper argues that although the government mainly controls the knowledge construction of women’s health in the HPV program, women are by no means passive recipients. Their lived experiences also constituted a vital part of the knowledge production of HPV vaccination in mainland China.
Medical Guilds, Drama, and Pharmacy Education in Qing China
Speaker: Xinge Zhang
Role: Paper Presenter
Institution/Affiliation: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Abstract: The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China saw the emergence of vernacular works in which characters are all named after medicines. This paper, centering on the pharmaceutical novel and plays, demonstrates how the narrative moved from page to stage and the critical role played by medical guilds in making the story suitable for performance on stage. I begin by examining the late-eighteenth-century novel Annals of Herbs and Trees (Caomu chunqiu yanyi) used by Guo Xiusheng in developing his 1808 playscript, An Illustration of Numerous Drugs (Yaohuitu), and then engage in a reading of the play, paying particular attention to how the playwright reworked the story source from the novel into a ten-scene drama catering to medical experts. In the final part of this paper, I probe the question of reinventions of the script, stressing the role of pharmacy guilds in the production of a new eight-scene performance text titled Records of the Coincidence in Natures of Drugs (Yaoxing qiaohe ji).
Contamination or Configuration?: Wasting Worms in Late Imperial and Republican China
Speaker: Xiaoyan Ren
Role: Paper Presenter
Institution/Affiliation: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Abstract: “Lao chong 痨虫 (wasting worms)” have long been held in China as one of the major causes of “Fei lao 肺痨 (lung wasting),” or tuberculosis. This paper examines the understanding of wasting worms from late imperial to the Republican period, using TJ Hinrichs’s model of two distinct etiological views: “contamination-ontological” versus “Configuration-functional.” This paper argues that the two potentially conflicting views coexisted in late imperial medical texts. However, compared to Daoist texts, Ming-Qing medical texts tended to prioritize the “Configuration-functional view.” It was this prioritization that helped Traditional Chinese Medicine to defend itself against the challenge of scientific germ theory of disease in the twentieth century.
Knowledge Production of HPV and its Vaccination in Mainland China (the 2010s to the present)
Speaker: Yating Li
Role: Paper Presenter
Institution/Affiliation: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Abstract: The human papillomavirus (HPV) is one of the most common sexually transmitted infections for women and men worldwide. This research will examine the knowledge of the HPV vaccination produced by official documents, social media (unofficial articles and online discussion), and individual lived experiences, which co-construct its multiple social meanings. Under such discursive influences which produce “common knowledge” about what the HPV vaccine is and its efficacy, most young Chinese women are afraid of being left behind, especially when there is a maximum age for vaccination. My first argument is that the state’s power mainly controls the knowledge construction of women’s health in the HPV program. However, women did not passively accept the knowledge of HPV vaccines produced by official documents and unofficial articles. I argue that women’s lived experiences also constituted a more and more important part of the knowledge production of HPV vaccination in mainland China.
The Chinese Opium-Eater Through Imperial Eyes (1832-1851): Sickness, Disability, and Redemption
Speaker: Yuwei Jiang
Role: Paper Presenter
Institution/Affiliation: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Abstract: This paper poses the question how Western travelers and missionaries had represented ordinary Chinese opium users prior to and in the immediate aftermath of the First Opium War (1839-1842), focusing on The Chinese Repository. Furthermore, it examines how domestic politics and the social backgrounds of these writers affected their representations and how such accounts as first-hand ethnographic evidence help us recover the underrepresented voice of opium users and move beyond the body of received historiography that does little more than victimizing and shaming Chinese opium users. Paradoxically, it also sheds light on the role of Western travelers and missionaries themselves in creating and perpetuating the deep-seated image of the Chinese opium eater as victims and Chinese backwardness incarnate, which profoundly informed political activism in China and extended well into the latter half of the century and beyond.