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Thesis ID: CBB001561029

Protecting the National Body: Gender and Public Health in Southwest China during the War with Japan, 1937--1945 (2012)

University of California, Irvine
Pomeranz, Kenneth L.

Publication Date: 2012
Edition Details: Advisor: Pomeranz, Kenneth L.
Physical Details: 417 pp.
Language: English

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"Protecting the National Body" demonstrates that China's eight-year War of Resistance against Japan fundamentally changed its public health and medical systems. It focuses on the wartime capital of Chongqing, discussing the work of local and national state administrations: the Chongqing Bureau of Public Health, the Central Institute of National Medicine, the National Health Administration, and the Sichuan Provincial Health Administration. It illustrates continuities in Nationalist Party policies between the Nanjing Decade (1927-37) and the Chongqing years (1938-45), and argues that non-local health officials attempted to re-fashion the Sichuan city in the image of coastal Nanjing or Shanghai, while failing to take adequate account of local conditions. This dissertation emphasizes that the war produced new opportunities as well as social upheaval. Health officials expanded their services into interior provinces, drawing them into the Chinese nation; medical researchers and scientists collaborated in innovative studies; medical reformers secured a place for Chinese medicine in the wartime and post-war state administration; and wartime public health administration served as the sturdy scaffolding upon which the Communist and Taiwanese states constructed their medical systems in the post-war years. This dissertation also analyzes public health as an expression of social values, with particular attention to gender. The war created new opportunities for women to participate in the world of medicine, as both patients and professionals, while also reifying gender hierarchies and gender-bound notions of citizenship. China's hybrid medical system--a unique combination of scientized Chinese medicine and indigenized biomedicine--solidified during the war, while the national emergency forced the state to utilize the skills of Chinese medicine practitioners, thereby giving them greater professional footing. At the same time, the pressing needs of the war era, increasing dialogue about state medicine, the advent of sulfa drugs and penicillin, and military and charitable assistance from abroad all contributed to a higher profile for scientific biomedicine during the war. These three forces--women's increased participation in a hierarchical profession, the hybridization of medicine, and greater traction for scientific biomedicine--changed the social landscape of medicine in wartime China.

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Description Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. (2012). ProQuest Doc. ID 1112073960.

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