China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: T. J. Hinrichs, Harvard University
Chair: Yuan-ling Chao, Middle Tennessee State University
Discussant: Robert Hymes, Columbia University
Explanations of disease transmission and epidemics are expressed, contested, and negotiated in the varieties of response to disease. We can see these responses in bodily experiences of illness; in practices aimed at avoiding, containing, and removing sources of disease; and in the development of new explanations for disease and contagion. The profound resonances of contagion and of epidemics (sometimes, but not always paired)—in the experience of illness as violation; in the provoking of fear, distrust, and violence; in struggles to shape, organize, and resist macro-level responses to epidemics; in the creation and widening of ruptures, as well as strengthening of cohesion in the community—both create new stakes for historical actors, and sharpen diverse domains of conflict and change.
This panel will look at the contesting of models of contagion in the Song, late Ming, and early Republican periods. In the Song, we see contagion contested in the demarcating of a medical orthodoxy in which epidemics were explained according to increasingly elaborate seasonal resonance, or "configuration" models. In the late Ming, we see theories of regional variation and contagion proposed as alternatives to or refinements of the by then dominant configurationist models. In the early twentieth century germ theory models and the identification of China as the contagious "Other’ became a focus of conflict and resistance, entering into a discourse of nationalism. The contesting of new and received models of contagion was not confined to doctors. The deep resonances and wide-ranging implications of these models reached across society.
T. J. Hinrichs, Harvard University
Whether certain diseases were contagious or not came to the fore as a point of controversy in the Song. Contagion emerged as an object against which to define medical orthodoxy in the tenth and eleventh centuries in contexts of the production and dissemination of officially authorized medical texts, the expansion of the government’s role in medical education and medical relief measures, and attempts to transform southern customs based on beliefs in demonic contagion. These attempts culminated in the development of policies in the eleventh century for disseminating medical knowledge and "returning shamans to agriculture" or converting them into medical practitioners.
While these policies appear to have been largely abandoned in the southern Song, contagion continued to appear as a sign of medical heterodoxy. The most extensive anti-contagionist argument of this period is found in Cheng Jiong’s Treatise on Correcting Fundamentals through the Canons of Medicine (Yijing zhengben shu, 1176). The central problem for Cheng is establishing the heterodoxy of contagion vis-à-vis the medical classics. Cheng and those who took opposing positions, including Zhu Xi, based their arguments on moral, experiential (evidence drawn from their own or other’s experiences), and textual grounds.
This paper will examine the role of contagion in relation to contemporary developments in medical theories of epidemics, the increasing marginalization of contagious explanations of disease from "orthodox" medical discourse, and the ethical and political stakes of officials and elite producers of medical knowledge.
Marta E. Hanson, University of California, San Diego
Throughout history and across all cultures, the medical historian Charles Rosenberg argues, humans have relied on three modes of explanation for epidemic diseases: (1) a particular configuration of climate, environment, or community that has upset a health-sustaining balance; (2) a contagion of some kind of morbid material that can be transmitted from person to person; and (3) a predisposition of individuals that either protects them from or makes them more susceptible to disease, explaining why some fall ill when others do not. Although these explanations appear contrary to each other—holistic, reductionistic, and individualistic—they have often peacefully coexisted.
This paper will look at three works of the last two decades of the Ming dynasty whose attempts to correct deficiencies in received explanations of disease apply or criticize one or more of these models. In his Complete Treatise on Summer-Heat Disorders (Shangshu quanshu, 1623) Zhang Heteng, writing on a disease he found endemic in the tropics but neglected in the classics, refined the dominant seasonal configurationist perspective to include regional deviations. Chen Sicheng wrote the Secret Treatise on Mold Sores (Meichuang milu, 1632) in response to deficiencies in the received canon and ignorance among his contemporaries on venereal disorders. He combined configurationist and contaminationist perspectives in his proposal that venereal disorders were caused by the mold-producing dampness of the tropics and transmitted through intercourse, body contact, and the womb. Wu Youxing’s Treatise on Heat Factor Epidemics (Wenyi lun, 1642), by contrast, offers a contagionist alternative to traditional configurationist models. Despite their fundamental differences, all three monographs share a skeptical approach to the canons of antiquity and participated in the Ming intellectual trend of cosmological criticism.
B. J. Andrews, University of Pennsylvania
This paper argues that to describe a disease as contagious is to say that it comes from outside, from strangers. Attempts to combat the dangers of contagion take place at the boundary between "us" and "them": to label a person or a community as contagious is an act of "othering." In modern Chinese history, the perception of where this boundary lies has changed significantly.
In nineteenth century China, contagion (smallpox, cholera, plague, etc.) was dealt with at community level. Starting with the outbreak of pneumonic plague in Manchuria in 1910, such local responses gave way to regional and even national initiatives, driven by the exigencies of international trade and politics. The Chinese government was forced to accept the international view of its own population as dangerously prone to contagious disease and to act in such a way as to protect foreign investments.
Within medical discourse, western-trained Chinese doctors tended to accept this interpretation, which redrew the contagion border around all of China. Physicians of Chinese medicine, however, along with public opinion, rejected the anti-Chinese racism inherent in the new sanitary policing methods. This paper explores the counter-discourse of national vitality, national medicine, and foreign threat. It is argued that this new national consciousness also entailed a new individualism, in which some of the responsibility for defending the Chinese nation against foreign imperialism was conceived in terms of one’s own health and fitness. Chinese-medical solutions to the problem of contagion were mainly directed at this level of personal responsibility.