1st Edition
Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945-1963 A Medicine of Revolution
Using original sources, this significant text looks at the transformation of Chinese medicine from a marginal, side-lined medical practice of the early twentieth century, to an essential and high-profile part of the national health-care system under the Chinese Communist Party. The political, economic and social motives which drove this promotion are analyzed and the extraordinary role that Chinese medicine was meant to play in Mao Zedong's revolution is fully explored for the first time, making a major contribution to the history of Chinese medicine.
Biography
Kim Taylor is an affiliated scholar at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. Her research interests include the history of disease, medicine and the imperial world and nineteenth and twentieth-century Chinese medicine.
'Kim Taylor's book, Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, is a gratifying addition to the list of genuinely new historical studies.' - China Quarterly
'Taylor has written a significant work thath makes real contributions to our understanding of changing pedagogic and therapeutic practices in Chinese medicine.' - China Journal
'The first coherent analysis of non-"Western" medicine in the People's Republic ... a welcome contribution to a timely topic, of high academic standard and succinctly written in accessible language.' - Asian Affairs
What Taylor offers is a dense descriptive investigation illuminating the
dimensions of political rhetoric within the processes of the development and
canonization of medical knowledge in the early years of the People’s Republic of
China. - Angelika C. Messner
