IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB568414717

Invulnerable Facts: Infant Mortality and Development in Nationalist Gansu (2020)

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
Volume: 14
Issue: 4
Pages: 623-645
Publication date: 2020
Language: English

DOI: 10.1215/18752160-8771166

URI: https://doi.org/10.1215/18752160-8771166

Outside Links

PubMed

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Public health Newborn infants--mortality Gansu Maternal health services Medicine 20th century China Republic of China (1912-1949)

This article examines responses to high rates of infant mortality in China’s northwestern province of Gansu during the Nationalist decades (1927–1949). Based on public health reports for both government and popular audiences, this article argues that the problem of Gansu’s especially high infant mortality rate was constructed to serve a particular political and economic agenda, drawing heavily not only from fascist ideals but also the logic of foreign philanthropists and Nationalist technocrats. Once established, the facts of this problem and its cause remained stubbornly invulnerable to new evidence. The article makes two primary contributions. First, it brings to light actors and institutions largely absent in existing scholarship on medicine and public health in Republican China. Second, it cautions against treating infant mortality rates referenced in the historical record as dispassionate measures of life and death. Rather, these purported facts affirm the value ascribed to reproductive health and its relevance for particular political aims.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB568414717

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Nicolas Schillinger; (2023)
Microbic Mass Destruction - Biological Warfare and Epidemic Prevention in Republican China (/p/isis/citation/CBB933083471/)

Article Margaret E. MacDonald; (March 2021)
Misoprostol: The Social Life of a Life-saving Drug in Global Maternal Health (/p/isis/citation/CBB680292467/)

Article Agnes R Howard; (2020)
Changing Expectation: Prenatal Care and the Creation of Healthy Pregnancy (/p/isis/citation/CBB545211650/)

Book Perkins, Barbara Bridgman; (2004)
The Medical Delivery Business: Health Reform, Childbirth, and the Economic Order (/p/isis/citation/CBB000450104/)

Book Francesca Arena; (2020)
Trouble dans la maternité: Pour une histoire des folies puerpérales, XVIIIe-XXe siècles (/p/isis/citation/CBB849669724/)

Article Matteo Manfredini; Marco Breschi; Alessio Fornasin; Stanislao Mazzoni; Sergio De lasio; Alfredo Coppa; (2020)
Maternal Mortality in 19th- and Early 20th-century Italy (/p/isis/citation/CBB205638611/)

Article Di Lu; (2020)
Local Food and Transnational Science: New Boundary Issues of the Caterpillar Fungus in Republican China (/p/isis/citation/CBB582601097/)

Article Jia-Chen Fu; (2016)
Houses of Experiment: Making Space for Science in Republican China (/p/isis/citation/CBB064259086/)

Chapter Stéphanie Homola; (2013)
La relation de maître à disciple en question : transmission orale et écrite des savoirs divinatoires en Chine et à Taïwan (/p/isis/citation/CBB309036679/)

Chapter Jan Kiely; (2010)
Spreading the Dharma with the Mechanized Press: New Buddhist Print Cultures in the Modern Chinese Print Revolution, 1866–1949 (/p/isis/citation/CBB543696442/)

Chapter Ling Shiao; (2010)
Culture, Commerce, and Connections: The Inner Dynamics of New Culture Publishing in the Post-May Fourth Period (/p/isis/citation/CBB216434082/)

Chapter Shen, Grace; (2014)
Periodical Space: Language and the Creation of Scientific Community in Republican China (/p/isis/citation/CBB001213961/)

Chapter Robert Culp; (2010)
Reading and Writing Zhejiang Youth: Local Textual Economies and Cultural Production in Republican Jiangnan (/p/isis/citation/CBB631363950/)

Article Hu, Shen; Li, Zhiping; (2013)
Heihe Animal Quarantine Bureau: The First Entry-Exit Animal Quarantine Organization Established by the Government of the Republic of China (/p/isis/citation/CBB001200172/)

Chapter Elman, Benjamin A.; (2014)
Toward a History of Modern Science in Republican China (/p/isis/citation/CBB001213952/)

Chapter Michael Shiyung Liu; (2014)
Epidemic Control and Wars in Republican China (1935-1955) (/p/isis/citation/CBB424577227/)

Chapter Lincoln Chen; Ling Chen; (2014)
China's Exceptional Health Transitions: Overcoming the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (/p/isis/citation/CBB239397770/)

Book Bridie Andrews; Mary Brown Bullock; (2014)
Medical Transitions in Twentieth-Century China (/p/isis/citation/CBB072800502/)

Chapter Volker Scheid; Sean Hsiang-Lin Lei; (2014)
The Institutionalization of Chinese Medicine (/p/isis/citation/CBB953319066/)

Chapter Miriam Gross; Kawai Fan; (2014)
Schistosomiasis (/p/isis/citation/CBB251223430/)