Organizer: Janet M. Theiss, University of Utah
Chair and Discussant: Francesca Bray, University of California, Santa Barbara
Medical practice, as a cultural product, is necessarily shaped by gender norms and social ideals governing the interactions between men and women. Historians have fruitfully examined how classical Chinese medicine defined gender differences, as well as how Chinese women used medical technology to influence their status as mothers and wives. This panel will explore the links between gender and medicine from yet another angle—that of the traditional Chinese medical practitioner. As an ensemble, the three papers chart the shifting linkages between gender, professional identity, and status within the medical-social hierarchy, and the correlation between these factors and different styles of healing and medical knowledge.
The first paper constructs a gendered interpretation of the career of a prominent Yuan Dynasty scholar-official known for his promotion of medical education, arguing that his public interest in medical practice was inspired by his private experience with the illnesses of his wife and mother. The second paper examines the career of an upper-class Qing Dynasty female physician, arguing that her medical activities represented a break with older forms of female practice, even as her professional identity continued to be informed by traditional gender norms. The third paper explores the gender division of labor in forensic medicine in Qing rape and homicide cases, illustrating how concerns with female propriety shaped judicial standards of medical evidence and created a professional niche in which the expertise of midwives and male coroners, both ranked at the bottom of the medical hierarchy, carried equal judicial weight.
A Gendered Window on the Social History of Medicine in Yuan China: The Case of Yuan Jue
Reiko Shinno, Stanford University
It is widely known among social historians of Chinese medicine that the Yuan regime promoted medical schools more extensively than did other dynasties, and that it also invented the tradition of building the Temples of the Three Emperors (Sanhuang miao) as medical temples and of attaching them to medical schools. My paper will explore why and how the Yuan government and elite promoted such institutions by examining the life and career of Yuan Jue (1266–1327), a famous scholar-official who wrote several inscriptions for the temples and also spent a considerable amount of ink on these institutions in his gazetteer for Ningbo.
Adopting a gendered approach to the interpretation of his motivations and medical activities, I will draw on Yuan’s biography and writings to consider how his public life as a scholar-official intersected with his private identity as a son and husband. Although he does not rationalize his interest in medicine by explicitly linking it to his personal life, it is likely that his mother’s and wife’s illness experiences, which he does describe, influenced his interest in promoting medical education. We will find that a gendered view of medical history is productive, even where the central figures about whom historians write are not women, and where Chinese discursive conventions may conceal their presence.
Flowery Rhymes and Medical Prescriptions: Gu Dehua and Upper-Class Female Healers in Qing China
Yi-Li Wu, Albion College
This paper presents a case study of Gu Dehua, a learned female physician from Suzhou (fl. 1821–1874). The first half of the paper analyzes Gu’s medical casebook, "Medical Cases from the Pavilion of Flowery Rhymes" (Huayunlou yi’an). Gu’s life and medical practice show that by the late Qing, upper-class female practitioners could leave behind the manual style of healing that distinguished the practice of similarly-situated female physicians during the Ming. I compare Gu’s medical writings to those of her male contemporaries and argue that there was no effective distinction between her use of classical medical techniques and those of elite male physicians.
However, although women such as Gu could achieve recognition for a high level of medical erudition, the scope and range of their medical activities continued to be framed by traditional norms of female domesticity. This point is developed in the second half of the paper, in which I compare Gu’s life and practices to that of other upper-class female practitioners from the late Qing and early Republic. Elite women’s medical work continued to be legitimated through their contribution to the household economy, and their healing activities were primarily directed at other women or family members. While lower-class female healers (such as midwives) might openly practice medicine as an occupation, this was not a model that upper-class women chose to emulate.
Medicine, Law and Propriety in the Forensic Examination of Women in 18th-Century China
Janet M. Theiss, University of Utah
Magistrates investigating homicide and rape cases were required to use a coroner to assist with medical examination of corpses or wounds suffered by a living victim. In the Qing Code, coroner’s manuals, magistrate’s handbooks and regulations governing forensic medicine, medical objectivity in the service of justice is the guiding principle for these examinations. The magistrate’s assessment of medical evidence, along with his adjudication of the case as a whole, was subject to extensive judicial review. This paper will argue, however, that when the victim was a woman, the procedures for such medical examinations were influenced by norms of propriety which often took precedence over medical and judicial standards of proof. Thus, while the magistrate and the coroner examined obvious wounds on a female victim, they often deferred to the wishes of her family and refrained from removing clothing. Despite the Code’s stringent standards of evidence for rape, in many rape cases, no medical examination was conducted at all. Instead the magistrate questioned family members about hidden wounds or had a family member examine the victim.
In cases involving suspected rape or injury to the genitals, suspected abortion, or pregnant victims, midwives were often engaged to examine the victim in consultation with her female relatives. Concerns for propriety thus determined a division of labor between coroners and midwives which gave the medical judgements of midwives and family members equal weight to those of male coroners, representing a surprising reversal of the usual denigration of midwives in favor of male medical practitioners.