A01=Charlotte Furth
Author_Charlotte Furth
birth
Category=NH
childbirth
china
chinese history
chinese medicine
class boundaries
clinical encounter
dominant medical culture
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
family
fertility
fuke
gender boundaries
gender studies
generation
gestation
gynecological disorder
gynecology
healing experts
history of chinese medicine
history of medicine
human body
imperial period
longevity
medical culture
medical history
medical practice
medicine
medicine for women
menstruation
ming dynasty
sexuality
song dynasty
the body
yangzhou
Product details
- ISBN 9780520208292
- Weight: 590g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 05 Mar 1999
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This book brings the study of gender to Chinese medicine and in so doing contextualizes Chinese medicine in history. It examines the rich but neglected tradition of fuke, or medicine for women, over the seven hundred years between the Song and the end of the Ming dynasty. Using medical classics, popular handbooks, case histories, and belles lettres, it explores evolving understandings of fertility and menstruation, gestation and childbirth, sexuality, and gynecological disorders. Furth locates medical practice in the home, where knowledge was not the monopoly of the learned physician and male doctors had to negotiate the class and gender boundaries of everyday life. Women as healers and as patients both participated in the dominant medical culture and sheltered a female sphere of expertise centered on, but not limited to, gestation and birth. Ultimately, her analysis of the relationship of language, text, and practice reaches beyond her immediate subject to address theoretical problems that arise when we look at the epistemological foundations of our knowledge of the body and its history.
Charlotte Furth is Professor of History, University of Southern California, author of Ting Wen-chiang: Science and China's New Culture (1970), and editor of The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China (1976).
